Creations of Art

Because of the overwhelming quantity of people and potential experiences in a city, according to Georg Simmel in the Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), personal expression becomes the last refuge of authentic identity.

Where quantitative increase of value and energy has reached its limits, one seizes on qualitative distinctions, so that, through taking advantage of the existing sensitivity to differences, the attention of the sochal world can, in some way, be found for oneself. This leads ultimately to the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravaganzas of self-distanciation, or caprice, of fastidiousness, the meaning of which is no longer to be found in the content of such activity itself but rather to its being a form of 'being different' -- of making oneself noticeable (58).

I would quibble with the idea that the so-called 'content' of these artists' work is not meaningful, but in g

. . .
ic Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or Louis Ferdinand CTline's Death on the Installment Plan should disabuse the reader that the endless propaganda drummed into generations of school children about the need for patriotism and religion had any validity. Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct, a film from the 1920s in which the young boys from a French boarding school openly rebel against their teachers and parents, is a perfect expression of this new cynicism. The rise of Hitler and other fascist movements, as well as the devastatingly murderous form of communism led by Stalin in the newly independent Soviet Union are the twin scourges which stand athwart the first half of the 20th century. The echoes of these traumatic historical episodes are still being felt in literature and the arts. Whatever faith in mankind still remained was largely undermined when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed after the defeat of Hitler and the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. One response was existentialism, which simply understood the lessons of the initial impetus of modernism and extended them to their logical conclusion. The writings of Jean-Paul Sartre are atheistic. He has fully accepted the Nietzschian notion that God is d
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Christian Taliban, Andre Breton, Balzac Zola, Robert Indiana, Guy Debord, World War, Origin Species, Mental Life, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, 20th century, world war, sexual imagery, bourgeois society, write intransitive verb, physical sciences, existentialism simply, century artists, corporate television, metropolis mental, christian context, metropolis mental life, mental life 1903,
Approximate Word count = 3147
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Creations of Art