Ian Dunlop - Anti-Trust 2001 - Hannibal 2000 - John Updike - Carl Gustav Jung - Proverbs - Ecclesiastes 1:9 - II Corinthians 5:17 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Rudolf Steiner - Voltaire - The Romantics & Us with Simon Schama TV -
The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art. Ian Dunlop, title of book
New discoveries are made hourly. New ideas are ready to be redefined and devoured. Anti-Trust 2001 starring Tim Robbins & Ryan Phillippe & Rachael Leigh Cook & Claire Forlani & Douglas McFerran & Richard Roundtree & Nate Dushku & Ned Bellamy et al, director Peter Howitt, opening scene
After all, as your mother tells you and as my mother certainly told me, it is important, she always used to say, always to try new things. Open up. Hannibal 2000 starring Anthony Hopkins & Julianne Moore & Gary Oldman & Ray Liotta & Frankie Faison & Giancarlo Giannini & Francesca Neri & David Andrews & Francis Guianan et al, director Ridley Scott
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. John Updike
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves. Carl Gustav Jung
There is nothing new under the sun. Late 16th century proverb
There is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. II Corinthians 5:17
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
He who would create the new must be able to endure the passing of the old in full tranquillity. Rudolf Steiner, The Soul’s Awakening
If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new. Voltaire, Candide, 1759
You may think our modern world was born yesterday. But it wasn’t, not even the day before yesterday. Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power. The raw passion of national belonging. Good and bad. Our obsession with the self and our own psychology and the dark recesses of the human mind. Even our love of nature, our concern for the future of the planet, all of this was the creation of the Romantics: a generation of artists living and working two hundred years ago around the time of the French revolution. Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change. And it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then. The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama, BBC 2020
The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly, and many of them died young. ibid.
If you’ve ever been on a march for whatever cause, you’ve experienced one of the great inventions of the Romantics brought into the modern world … A new religion of insurrection and agitation in which everyone can take to the streets to fight for freedom, equality and justice. ibid.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix: It’s been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since … Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions in which the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of liberty, equality and the rights of man. ibid.
Delacroix’s image had its most famous resurrection during the Paris Uprisings of 1968 when students and workers came together on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism of French society under [Charles] de Gaulle. ibid.
The students took over the most prestigious art school and covered Paris in revolutionary slogans, poetry and street art. ibid.
William Blake: His head swam with visions. As he walked through the streets of his city he saw angels in the trees and amongst the haymakers in the fields. He was always reaching for that bit of heaven and he sees everyone as potentially wonderful. ibid.
Perhaps the most surprising or at least the bravest was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792, fired up by the revolution, Mary had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women … And so she arrived in Paris. ibid.
Over the next two years Mary witnessed the worst excesses of the Jacobean government. ibid.
You could see how the will of the people and the language of liberty became increasingly debased into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power. ibid.
In 1811 while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series of anonymous texts in defence of atheism and the freedom of the press. ibid.
He gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16-year-old. ibid.
Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy (1819): ‘As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me, To walk in the visions of Poesy.’ ibid.
Romanticism was born looking for trouble. Some airy change in taste: what many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world by revolution if it came to it. But what happened … when the romance of revolution ended in political failure and bloody disenchantment? The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama II: The Chambers of the Mind
Long before the invention of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers of the darker deeper regions of the human mind. ibid.
We go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world of the creative mind … Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams assisted by opium that our true self was revealed to us. ibid.
It gets you every time doesn’t it … It was the Romantics who gave us this intense passion for the nation. Who in their poetry, music and art transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth into something bigger and deeper – the secular devotion of national belonging. The Romantics & Us III: Tribes
Nationalism is above all the emotion of longing to go back or stay where you came from. ibid.