Smart by Frederic Martel

Author:Frederic Martel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

9

FROM CULTURE TO CONTENT

El Ateneo Grand Splendid is probably one the most beautiful libraries in the world. At No. 1860, Santa Fe Avenue, at the centre of Buenos Aires, the Argentinian culture scrolls through its history. Inaugurated in 1919, Teatro Grand Splendid was one of the hot spots of the tango. People danced here every evening for duple rhythm, while in the Studio Grand Splendid, located in the upper floors of the building, one made records of this standard-bearing music of the country. Soon, Radio Splendid would broadcast from the same building and showcase the tango to a wider audience. In the late 1920s, theatre becomes cinema, when the Talkies arrive. For the first time in Argentina, a film is screened in which the mute hero suddenly says, ‘Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.’ The reaction is historic as the crowd explodes with joy.

Today, the library preserves, on its 2,000 square metres, the whole mythology of this culture of the yesteryears. Like the Hollywood villas built between the two world wars, Balaban & Katz in Chicago, Ziegfeld Theatre of New York and Fox Theatre in Detroit, there still exists the luxurious hall with its grand staircase and decorated ceiling, giant chandeliers with thousands of bulbs scintillating intermittently, caryatids and stained glass and decorative carpets, and of course, two immense red velvet curtains on the stage, which open and close one on the other. In the stalls of the theatre, the thousand seats were replaced with shelves containing 120,000 books. The balconies accommodate CDs and DVDs; the green rooms are quiet spaces for reading. I see many students, from schools of art and creative writing, reading, sitting on the floor, The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges and Mille Plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Every year, since its opening in 2000, more than a million people come here for their purchases. In the El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore, books and cultural goods are a show. But for how long?

On stage, which itself has been transformed into a café, I meet Hernán Botbol, the co-founder of taringa.net, one of the main sites in Argentina. His office being located upstairs, above the bookstore, he meets me here, at Impresso Café, in the middle of books, music, films and magazines. Looking at the shelves of El Ateneo, furnished with cultural goods, he pauses and tells me, with no empathy, ‘All this is going to disappear! All of it!’ He adds, ‘Except when you go to a museum.’

Taringa is a Latino social networking site, like Facebook, where one can exchange cultural content with an unknown person (the Tweets are called ‘shouts’ and they must contain less than 256 characters, and the same goes for ‘reshoots’). ‘On Facebook, the important thing you share is your offline life that you share online. On Taringa, the important thing is content. People follow you for the content you post or produce.’ Something between a peer-to-peer community site and a blog platform of the Tumblr type, it is an original social network which promotes cultural recommendations and exchanges.

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