Claudio Pérez, a correspondent sent by El País to New York to cover the financial crisis, wrote in an article published on Friday, 19 September 2008: ‘The New York tabloids are rushing around like madmen looking for a broker about to fling himself into the void from the top of one of those imposing skyscrapers which house the major investment banks, the fallen idols that the financial hurricane has been reducing to rubble.’ Let’s keep hold of this image for a moment: a pack of photographers, paparazzi, scouring the skyline, cameras at the ready, waiting to capture the first suicide that would be a graphic, dramatic and spectacular embodiment of the financial catastrophe that wiped out billions of dollars and ruined big businesses and countless ordinary people. There can be no better image, I think, that encapsulates our contemporary civilization.

It seems to me that this is the best way to define the civilization of our time, a civilization shared by Western countries, countries in Asia that have achieved high levels of development and many nations in the so-called Third World.

What do we mean by civilization of the spectacle? The civilization of a world in which pride of place, in terms of a scale of values, is given to entertainment, and where having a good time, escaping boredom, is the universal passion. To have this goal in life is perfectly legitimate, of course. Only a Puritan fanatic could reproach members of a society for wanting to find relaxation, fun and amusement in lives that are often circumscribed by depressing and sometimes soul-destroying routine. But converting this natural propensity for enjoying oneself into a supreme value has unexpected consequences: it leads to culture becoming banal, frivolity becoming widespread and, in the field of news coverage, it leads to the spread of irresponsible journalism based on gossip and scandal.

What has caused the West to slide towards this kind of civilization? The material well-being that followed the years of privation during the Second World War and the shortages of the post-war years. After this very tough period, there was a moment of extraordinary economic growth. In every democratic and liberal society in Europe and North America, the middle classes grew exponentially, there was increased social mobility and, at the same time, there was a notable extension of moral parameters, beginning with our sex lives, which had traditionally been held in check by churches and by the prudish secularism of political parties, from right and left. Well-being, a freer lifestyle and the increased time given to leisure in the developed world gave an important stimulus to leisure industries, promoted by advertising, the inspiration and magical guide for our times. So, systematically and imperceptibly, not being bored, avoiding anything that might be disturbing, worrying or distressing, became for increasing numbers both at the pinnacle and at the base of the social pyramid, a generational mandate, what Ortega y Gasset called ‘the spirit of our time’, a fun, spoiled and frivolous god to which, wittingly or unwittingly, we have been paying increasing allegiance for at least fifty years.

Another, no less important, factor in the shaping of this reality has been the democratization of culture. This is a phenomenon born of altruism: culture could no longer be the patrimony of an elite; liberal and democratic society had a moral obligation to make culture accessible to all, through education and through promoting and supporting the arts, literature and other cultural expression. This commendable philosophy has had the undesired effect of trivializing and cheapening cultural life, justifying superficial form and content in works on the grounds of fulfilling a civic duty to reach the greatest number. Quantity at the expense of quality. This criterion, the domain of the worst demagogues in the political arena, has caused unexpected reverberations in the cultural sphere, such as the disappearance of high culture, by its very nature a minority undertaking due to the complexity and on occasion hermetic nature of its codes, and the massification of the very concept of culture. Culture has now become exclusively accepted in its anthropological definition. That is, culture is all the manifestations of the life of a community: its language, beliefs, habits and customs, clothing, skills and, in short, everything that is exercised, avoided, respected or hated in that community. When the idea of culture becomes an amalgam of this kind, then it is inevitable that it might come to be understood merely as a pleasant way of spending time. Of course, culture can indeed be a pleasing pastime, but if it is just this, then the very concept becomes distorted and debased: everything included under the term becomes equal and uniform; a Verdi opera, the philosophy of Kant, a concert by the Rolling Stones and a performance by the Cirque du Soleil have equal value.

It is not surprising therefore that the most representative literature of our times is ‘light’, easy literature, which, without any sense of shame, sets out to be – as its primary and almost exclusive objective – entertaining. But let’s be clear: I am not in any way condemning the authors of this entertainment literature because, notwithstanding the levity of their texts, they include some really talented writers. If today it is rare to see literary adventures as daring as those of Joyce, Woolf, Rilke or Borges, it is not just down to the writers. For the culture in which we live does not favour, but rather discourages, the indefatigable efforts that produce works that require of the readers an intellectual concentration almost as great as that of their writers. Today’s readers require easy books that entertain them and this demand creates a pressure that becomes a powerful incentive to writers.

It is also not accidental that criticism has all but disappeared from the news media and has taken refuge in those cloistered communities called humanities faculties, and in particular in literature departments, whose work is accessible only to specialists. It is true that the more serious newspapers and journals still publish reviews of books, exhibitions and concerts, but does anyone read these solitary paladins who try to map a scale of value onto the tangled jungle that contemporary culture has become? In the days of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, criticism played a central role in the world of culture because it helped guide citizens in the difficult task of judging what they heard, saw and read. Now critics are a dying breed, to whom nobody pays attention unless they also turn themselves into a form of entertainment and spectacle.

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.

In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers and (further back still) theologians. Half a century ago in the United States, it was probably Edmund Wilson, in his articles in The New Yorker or The New Republic, who decided the success or failure of a book, a poem, a novel or an essay. Now the Oprah Winfrey Show makes these decisions.

The vacuum left by the disappearance of criticism has been filled, imperceptibly, by advertising, and advertising is now not just an integral part of cultural life, it is its main vector. Advertising plays a decisive role in forming taste, sensibility, imagination and customs. Anonymous ‘creative’ people in advertising agencies now fulfil the role previously played, in this sphere, by philosophical systems, religious beliefs, ideologies and doctrines and the mentors that in France were called the ‘mandarins’ of an age. It was perhaps inevitable that this would happen from the moment when artistic and literary works came to be considered as commercial products, whose very survival or extinction depended on the fluctuations of the market, that tragic period in which the price became confused with the value of a work of art. When a culture relegates critical thinking to the attic of items no longer in fashion and replaces ideas with images, then literary and artistic products are promoted, accepted or rejected through advertising techniques and the conditioned reflexes of a public that lacks the intellectual and discriminatory antennae to detect when it is being duped. By this route, the exaggerated fashions that John Galliano displayed on Parisian catwalks (before it was discovered that he was anti-Semitic), or experiments in nouvelle cuisine, achieve the status of honorary citizens of high culture.

This state of affairs has also led to the celebration of music, to such an extent that it has become a badge of identity for new generations the world over. Fashionable bands and singers attract huge crowds to their concerts, which, like the Dionysian pagan festivals that celebrated irrationality in ancient Greece, are collective ceremonies of excess...