Art

 

Marinetti

Was art ever value-free? Just ignoring the Anschluss is not a recipe for imagination. However, the current climate is so ideology driven that absence becomes a conviction in and of itself. There was a time when you read The Magic Mountain to literally ascend as did Mann's characters to an aerie above the cares of everyday life. The fact is they aren't, in the end, spared either. The inward turning novel which spins on the ideational conflict between Settembrini, a representative of Enlightenment rationalism and Naphta, symbol of the transcendent and supernal is laid to rest with the murder of the Archduke at Sarajevo and the onset of one of the great massacres in human history. Both the country and the world are polarized. MAGA style populism is evidenced in Britain with Nigel Farage and in France by Marine Le Pen. Ironically Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of The Futurist Manifesto, was a fascist. You may remember Winston and Julia seeking to escape Newspeak in l984. Was Art ever a neutral country?

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver