Daily I find myself amazed at the amount of fine artistry that exists in our world; the creations of new minds are constantly coming to my attention. The beauty of all this art contrasts severely with the ugliness of physical slaughter from global conflicts. I wish that art would utterly overtake war.
In times past, maybe people heard rumors of warfare by means of messengers on horseback: a man might come riding into town and announce that Iowa has invaded Minnesota. Nowadays we see, directly as the events are occurring, electronic photographs and cinematic documentation of war’s atrocities: these are shared online by not only the troops performing them but also the civilians enduring them. And those of us who live elsewhere behold these barbarities on our screens and wonder why we possess eyes to see and ears to hear. For, although it is obviously worse to suffer at first hand any act of inhumanity, it is also a torment to be compelled to witness injustice while lacking a recourse to withstand it.
Dada and Surrealism came about as artistic reactions against the horrors of the first World War, like holding a mirror up to chaos. For the same reasons, I find these movements intriguing to this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment