Bullfighting is not art

The debate about bullfighting has reignited in Spain. A strong civic initiative in the autonomous region of Catalonia is pushing for the practice to be banned, while the region of Madrid considers bullfighting an art and wants to protect it as part of the country's cultural heritage. Painter Nicole Muchnik looks at the difference between art and fighting in the left-liberal daily El País: "It's easy to find a few thousand or more definitions of art in any language, but the mystery remains unsolved. Nonetheless we can use a simple reflection as our basis: art is not reality. It is a glance we take at reality. The result, whether a picture, a piece of writing or a piece of music, is a representation of reality filtered through the perception of the artist. Bullfighting, on the other hand, is reality. The spectacle is not the representation of death but death itself."

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