Make it new

As Ezra Pound once said, “Make it new! Art is a joyous thing.”  We make art because we have fun and joy while making it. No one would want to look at art that are cliché with similar style repeating over and over again. We are constantly attracted to new things and want to be unique in a way that breaks away from conventional thinking or style. As technology improves such as the invention of camera, realistic painting began to lose its popularity that camera can always better capture the world exactly as it is presented. Although photographs during the early 1900s are still black and white with no color, people no longer need painter to realistically paint objects or person that photographs are much cheaper and faster to produce. Therefore artist began to make new art that diverge from realism. Entering modernism, artist began to paint abstract things and ideas and putting more of a personal emotion into their art. Instead of trying to be realistic, artist such as Picasso painted the world with a new and unique style that people or object look different from reality. These kind of innovative art attract people’s attention and allow artist to have more freedom and room to explore art with creativity.

Modernism

uring the beginning of 20^th century, modernism began to appear that people began a different movement from realism or romanticism. Different from other movement, modernism take bold experimentation in style and forms that it reject traditional theme such as romantic drawing or story. People start to view the world with new way of thinking that they reject sentimentality or artificiality. Instead of liking romantic hero who is ultimately strong and perfect, modernism favors hero who is flawed and disillusioned yet shows grace under these pressure and in the end develop into a strong character.  Modernistic literature revolves around the themes of individualism and how government, religion or other institution lied and oppressive individual expression. Some of the famous Modernist artist such as Picasso abandoned traditional thinking and conventional belief and draw painting with people whose has eyes on only 1 side of the head. Different from Romanticism, Modernism examines ordinary subject matter and interested in the inner workings of human minds. Different from Realism, Modernism introduce concept such as disjointed timeline where a story doesn’t necessary follow a linear strict chronological order that story and events may just pop out randomnly like how people recall their memory. Modernism experiment on novel ideas and style that don’t necessary are comprehensible to people when they first see it. 

American Dream

“America is a land of beauty, bounty and unlimited promises.” American dream is the basis that form American’s mind that America is a place of possibility and future. There are basically 3 parts of American dream: Land of future, progress and individual. With American dream, people believed that America is where everything becomes possible that there is no such thing as impossible. People that used to be oppressed and prosecuted in their old country are able to start fresh like a new person in America without having your past hunting you. People are so optimistic that they believe that in America, life will only get better and better that the world is going to move into an era of greater joy, justice and wealth. Also they triumph individual that they believe everything is possible for people who place trust in his or her own power and potential. They believe that individual will make a world a better place with democratic society where everyone’s opinion matters. However as modern era began, they realized that nothing is always 100 percent perfect that within a system there will be flaws and dilemma. Slavery is one of the problem that caused American Dream to be questioned. 

Better Things?

As Willa Cather had said, “Men travel faster, but I do not know if they go to better things.” As technology and the world changes, the dilemma of the modern age begins to rise to the surface. Should we sacrifice the rain forest and other natural resources for better technology and human living places? Should we abandon civilization and embrace nature in order to protect the world? There are tons of dilemmas we are facing in the world today. “No sacrifice, no victory.” In order to gain, we have to sacrifice some other things. However, is the sacrifice necessary in order for us to gain the benefit? Is it possible to gain without losing values alone with it? It is incredibly hard to reach a compromise that neither too much is lost or too less is gain. As some people believed, our society is improving when technology such as cars or internet develop. However, as we develop faster transportation, there are more death caused by car accident and leaks of private information due to insecurity in internet network. I believe as our society improves, more issues came along with it. In order to solve this dilemma, we should overcome the difficulties and come to a compromise so that neither side will be affected greatly.  

On impulse

Everyone has impulses, a drive, for them to do certain things, which can be “good” or “bad” thing. Most of the time, people can control themselves on whether or not they should actually act on their impulses. However, when people can’t control their instinctual impulses, most of the time their behaviors get them into troubles and legal issues. One classical example of impulses now a day for teenagers is the impulse to go on face book. We all know how facebook is interactive that it brings entertainment and social connection between people. People can chat, comment on people’s updates and picture and play games on face book. However, often times, facebook is like a maze that often times we got trap in it before knowing that we have wasted more than 2 hours surfing through people’s profiles and picture online. For example, when you see a new e-mail saying that blah blah has commented something on your picture, you will want to log into facebook and check out the message. However, your inner-self keeps telling you to ignore the mail because you may spend more than 2 hours online. However, the impulse is so great that you tell yourself that you will only spend no more than 5 minutes on it. Once you log in, new message keep popping out one after another on facebook that you couldn’t go offline. Once 2 hours pass, you regretted that you have once again fall into the trap of impulse.

Romantics VS Realists

The main difference between romantics and realists is that the romantics are idealistic and realists are realistic. The romantics believe that people can find truth and tranquility in supernatural, imaginative inner world. They tend to escape reality to an idealistic world where everyone lives happily and the evils are always defeated by the good. Probably these romantics want to avoid the sadness and pain of the world. On the other hand, realistic stay true and embrace reality. In their novels or poems, realists portray ordinary common things using everyday speech and stay true to reality without being pessimistic or optimistic of the world. They tend to just portray everyday life as true as possible without taking sides. Realists avoided heroes or extreme villains portray in dark romantic’s novels. Romantics writing tend to be filled with emotions where the events are extreme to both end that they can be extremely optimistic or pessimistic. As mention earlier in previous blog, the emergence of realism in America is mainly due the American civil war where writers discover that they can no longer portray the world as idealistic as before. Facing all the violence and ambivalence of evil or good, writer decides to portray the world they see with realistic perspective. 

Think About

As civil war progress, American writers and poets responded to it by writing novels and poems that portray on the realistic aspect of the war. At about 1865, when the civil war ended, the American realism began to spread that writers abandoned their romantic values of the world which portray romantic heroes and events. One of the most representative novels of the civil war, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane portrays a regular rookie soldier who experiences extreme terror in the war. Instead of depicting how heroic the protagonist is and the glorious victory of the battle, Stephan Crane portray soldier’s one victory of a battle is so insignificant to the overall war effort that realistic portray the cruelty of war and people’s nature fear of death during battle. One of the aspect of Realism writing is the used of common, everyday speech pattern to show how people really talk instead of florid and ostentatious speech. Aside from Realism, naturalism became to come about at the same time. Different from realism, naturalism forces on the philosophical aspect of the world. Realism tends to portray an event and situation where as naturalism shows how human are powerless in controlling their own fate and destinies that everything is determined by environment or genes.