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There was a situationist phrase that recommended running away, quickly and far, to that person who was idealized by someone, by anyone, by a lover, a classmate, a poet, a baker, an artist or a friend of their sister.

"If you appear in someone's dreams, you're screwed,"

it seems to me that that was the adage, and if it wasn't exactly like that, it's well said with those words, because it expresses the discredit of the concept of muse in the contemporary world. .

Furthermore, the condition of muse is also obviously

problematic within the framework of 21st century feminism,

since its name evokes a type of passive woman, ephemerally graced in the silly lottery of charm and condemned, in the long run, to stop doing things. grace and to be abandoned like a puppy whose owners went to live in Florida.

What about the enmuser?

Well: that is a critical view that is easy to understand and difficult to refute. Except that we lose something along the way: the person who enmuses, it is true, tends to cage his idealized person between golden bars but, at least if he is sincere, he lives in

absolute dedication to the beauty of the world.

And that is a textbook romantic attitude, for the bad but also for the good, for the very good when compared to the relationship we have today with beauty.

Beauty, including human beauty, comes to meet us every minute without us having to look for it. And we, of course,

respond with indifference

and, on bad days, with skepticism. Faced with that face that would have made our parents stagger with embarrassment in 1970, today we say "it's just another pretty look on Instagram", we say "it's probably not that big of a deal and it's just someone who takes advantage of the photos", we say "With those freckles and those light blue eyes, that girl is, evidently, the creation of an artificial intelligence."

Artists and their muses

How can we not feel a little envious of Dalí, who experienced Gala's discovery as an epiphany?

Buñuel with Catherine, Kieslowski with Irène, Visconti with Alain

... We could all call them vampires, but will we ever experience beauty with that intensity? On the other hand, the relationship between the artist and his muse also appears devalued today, because it appears in the form of an endorsement. The artist is no longer Dalí but rather a firm that belongs to a conglomerate. And the muse is no longer a beauty like Kiti Mánver in 'Habla mudita', but rather a very busy actress who receives very good payments in exchange for some nice photos and giving some intimate interviews (but not completely) in the magazine 'Die Welt'.

Alicia Vikander and Vincent Macaigne in the series 'Irma Vep'.IMDB

Well, sometimes proper names do appear.

Nicolas Ghesquière has linked his prestige to those of Léa Seydoux and Alicia Vikander,

as Karl Lagerfeld did to that of Kristen Stewart; Olivier Rousteing to Kim Kardashian... And everything has been good, but nothing has been more than a representation of the old musing in the style of Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn. Je me souviens, I remember David Beckham portrayed while he was sleeping by Sam Taylor-Johnson... That was very good and also had the added bonus of man and woman exchanging the roles of muse and adoring artist. But 21 years have passed since that film and Beckham is already a man who wears three-piece suits and whose tattoos peek out from his shirt sleeves.

Assayas and Maggie Cheung

Did Alicia Vikander's name come up a few lines back? Vikander was the protagonist of

'Irma Vep'

(2022), the series in which filmmaker Olivier Assayas narrated an absolutely dysfunctional filming whose members ended up in a psychiatrist's office, dazed by a succession of scenes of dream terror and ghostly apparitions. Vincent Macaigne (yes, yes, that very muso French actor; fat, bald and with shaggy hair) played Assayas's alter ego, who was deranged because he had once played the comedy of the artist and the muse (in the case of Assayas, the muse was the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung).

Maggie Cheung in the film 'Irma Vep', 1996.IMDB

Until the game ended, and the artist was the loser. Assayas, as is understood when watching 'Irma Vep', spent his 20s chasing ghosts, looking for women who were like Maggie Cheung in order to forget Maggie Cheung. What a bad plan, right? In 'Irma Vep', Alicia Vikander was the last of those women, the most refined version possible. Only her character was not a blank sheet of paper: Vikander played a strong and at the same time fragile woman, bored with herself, adored by the public but abandoned by her lover. Everything she did was charming and she hated herself for it.

She was the disgusted muse, willing to swap her role with the artist,

like in those stories in which the predator ends up being the victim and the victim becomes the predator.

The case of F. and his girlfriend

I have an old school friend, F., who, in the early years of social media,

obsessively published photographs of his girlfriend,

a woman who was, how can I put it, a normal girl who posed every day as if she were Romy Schneider in 'The pool'. It was 2008 when those photographs were taken, we were in our early thirties and we were all a little more innocent for these things, innocent to pose and innocent to look. However, around 2010 the boredom of my partner's muse began to be evident. Then their portraits disappeared from F.'s wall and, later, social networks changed and school friends were replaced by political activists and cryptocurrency sellers. Well, to what I was going: it was easy to understand the boredom of that neighborhood muse. But I also understand that there was something of nobility in the monomania of that classmate, whom I remember as a rather lonely and pessimistic boy. Today I think about it and I hope that things went well for F., that he didn't end up like Assayas after Maggie Cheung. I never met the girl; I suppose that when you think about F. now you will say what a strange time it was that you spent with her.

If you are in someone's dreams, run away,

like F's girlfriend did. That's the theory. What happens is that those of us who are no longer in our thirties no longer appear in anyone's dreams, so how can we not watch those games of dalís and galas with a sigh?

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