The Academies, an invention of classical Greece that spread throughout Europe from the Renaissance onwards as forums for cultural exchange and creation of enlightened communities with a liberal vocation, continue to have an active existence in the 21st century. There are dozens of Academies in Spain with humanist or scientific purposes – not to be confused with language academies, although they have the same origin -; Only the Consell Interacadèmic de Catalunya groups twelve.
Every year they receive new members (there are numbers and corresponding ones) who usually give a dissertation at their entrance ceremony. One might think that they are commitment texts, for the brief display. Nothing of that.
The entrance speeches at the RAE, the best known of the Spanish academies, have produced anthological pieces. That of Miguel Delibes in 1973, which he titled “The sense of progress from my work”, is considered a pioneer in ecological denunciation in Spain and the commitment to sustainable development. That of Martín de Riquer on the peninsular knights-errant constitutes an unparalleled reference on the subject. I fondly keep the one by Carme Riera, which I attended, on the literature of travelers to Mallorca.
In the Royal Academy of Good Letters, the oldest in Barcelona, ??an impressive archive of speeches is preserved, today digitized and freely accessible, in which Apel·les Mestres, Victor Català, Jaume Vicens Vives, Jordi Rubió, Salvador Espriu or Joan Perucho have addressed issues of philology, literature, history or thought; The medium-term edition of an anthology is being studied that will give a good account of the Catalan cultural debates of the last 150 years.
Last week I attended an admission ceremony at the Royal Academy of Doctors, which dates back to 1914 and brings together, with a transversal spirit, people concerned about the dilemmas of the contemporary world. Ildefonso García Serena, a renowned advertising and marketing figure, joined. Throughout the 20th century, Barcelona was the undisputed capital of advertising in Spain, and although in recent years Madrid has taken away its leadership in billing and companies, the discipline has a lot of weight and roots. They have practiced it in different categories from pioneers such as Prat Garballí to internationalized professionals such as Joaquín Lorente and Luis Bassat, passing through members of the cultural world such as Alexandre Cirici, Josep Maria Espinàs, Arturo San Agustín, Isabel Coixet or Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
A key concern in the advertising world is creativity, and García Serena dedicated his speech “The creative engine” to this issue. From Homo Sapiens to artificial intelligence”, very suggestive.
For the founder of the Gray Iberia agency and university professor (as well as a novelist), “the Creative Way is a work in itself, a system, a Method.” An attitude to solve problems. To stimulate it he suggests five strategies: One, “fill the memory store as much as you can. All experiences are useful: reading, cinema, theater, news, travel. Two, “adopt a different approach to problems, a different or better thought, even opposed to the usual prevailing sense.” Three, do not repress the first ideas that arise; write them down, above all do not judge them. Four, have firm confidence that a good solution will be found in the end. “If you distrust your brain, it already knows that it has no reason to help you.” Five, work in steps, “creativity is like navigation, there are no signs in the ocean, you need a compass.”
Finally, Artificial Intelligence. García Serena has proven – by introducing a car spot in the GPT4 chat – that she is capable of understanding the emotions that she wanted to put into it. And if she can understand them, who tells us that he won’t be able to create them? the new academic asked himself as the culmination of his speech.
