DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: domer on September 25, 2006, 02:16:26 PM
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When I was a law student at New York University, I would make weekly (or more) pilgrimages to the wealth of museums available there. One of my favorites, visited often, was the Museum of Modern Art, which then housed Picasso's immortal "Guernica," his homage to the horror of the Spanish Civil War and all war in general. This powerful, magnificent leap of the imagination, horror captured through the medium of an artist's soul, captivated me. Every time I visited that museum (often), I would ritually stand for a few minutes in front of that masterpiece trying to fathom the human condition and the new ways there were suggested (as with Picasso himself) of dealing with our basic human condition.
This, alas, is a perennial human struggle. Yet, ironically in our own time of advanced technological development, one of the timeless antidotes to man's inhumanity -- the artistic imagination, its arena and all kindred arenas -- are being supplanted with an evermore hungry yearning for a realism that cries for actual blood.
This is, perhaps, a fatal folly. We must return to arenas of "discourse" that accentuate our humanity, not destroy it.
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I was thinking of a good way to reply to this post.
I know it isn't the same thing, but one of my favorite books is All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque. The movie has probably supplanted the book in fame, but the author was indeed a soldier in the Great War. The novel gives an incredible description, not only of warfare, but of the soldier's return home and how the world he once understood (nationalism, patriotism, etc) became a foreign and bizarre world. Also of note is that Remarque was thoroughly rebuked by the Nazis who encouraged burning of his book and refused to allow war to be portrayed in a non-heroic fashion.
Also of note is that the title in German is Im Westen nicht Neues, which means "nothing new in the west." It was an ironic title meant to convey a tongue-in-cheek slap at the "west" - the bastion of civilization.
But as I said, that isn't the same. I think your point is very valid. Really, a great post Domer.
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domer
what do you think of goya`s later works?
your thoughts on Guernica,reminds me of goya.