Home » January, 2010
You are currently browsing entries posted in: January, 2010
It cannot be denied that the verbal arts, the drama, the novel and a great part of poetry have always fed on conflict, and that they have reached their greatest heights when the conflict was unresolvable except by a tragic end. How could a Shakespeare or a Tolstoy display their supreme talents in a world [...]
The attitude was ”better a horrible ending than a horror without end”. There had been peace in the world for too long. From Berlin, in the spring of 1914, Colonel House wrote to Woodrow Wilson, ”the whole of Germany is charged with electricity. Everybody’s nerves are tense. It only requires a spark to set the [...]
Questions are always asked when cataclysmic events arise, events that have great and shattering consequences,but seemingly lack proportionate causes. Why was disaster inevitable once hostilities of the great war of 1914-1918 broke out? People endured this inferno without justifying reasons,and it lead to judgements on human nature that, at best,were difficult and painful. Winston Churchill [...]
The times they were a’ changing. Albrecht Durer’s goal was to expand the expressive range of German art by bringing it to the expressive disciplines of the Renaissance. The vistas of the Alps, and the breadth and vigor of the intellectual life to the south of them, were revelations that transformed Durer’s art after a [...]
Albrecht Durer( 1471-1528 ) is usually called the greatest German artist, despite the importance accorded to Matthias Grunewald, whose more wild and fantastic fervor, even hallucinatory art, is more to the modern taste than Durer’s methodical exploration of the world and humankind’s place in it. Durer’s Germanness is intrinsic to him, and a mention of [...]
Andre Gide, a minor novelist, once called the “Comedie Humaine” of Balzac a great fresco crumbling to pieces a little more all the time. Given that he is not entirely wrong, it could be extrapolated today that the novel as art form is further along the path to extinction and our literary edifices is supported [...]
Yesterday’s radicalism fades in unaccountable ways into today’s reaction, and what the revolutionaries intended to build may turn out the precise reverse. ( Hannah Arendt ) What was new with the 60′s counter-culture was the sheer mass character of the movement. What happened was that while coteries of alienated artists and intellectuals have been around [...]
Psychedelic arty crashers. From the psychedelic movement there came, inevitably, psychedelic art, and like a great deal else in the movement, it contained much that is old, much that was new, and much that was borrowed and appropriated, especially from the Orient. On the new and futuristic side of the movement were light shows that [...]
Tea for two with the Maharishi. The drift along hippie life purported to be inherently religious, but even among the hippies there were always a few who tried harder. These are the various sages of the movement, who appointed themselves or styled themselves or merely promoted themselves a religious prophets and spiritual guides. This temple [...]
From New Harmony on, the lesson has always been the same. America and the Western World is hard on utopias. In the mid 1960′s there was a utopic commune in California called ”Morning Star” which was closed down for failing to meet the standards of an organized camp among other civil infractions that helped bring [...]
