At the moment I'm reading Erich Fromm's To Have or To Be? and I am frankly shocked by the fact how much up to date this still is. There is however one premise I would be more cautious about, which is contrasting "Western" (industrial) and "Eastern" culture and their attitudes towards life and nature and generalising by giving unique examples of artists' work to illustrate certain tendencies, eg the attitude towards living creatures which is pictured in the "Western" world as an attitude of supremacy and disection and in the "Eastern" as one of amazement and regard - there are also in "Western" culture examples of people with high regard for anything living and not just in the Middle Ages, eg there is James Ensor and his deeply rooted contempt for what he terms "vivisectors", people who disect living creatures. At least now I do have a hint why Zen Buddhism became so intriguing and predominant to some artists in the 1980s and 1990s, though I could never buy it myself because it is not my cultural and personal background, cf http://das-unmoegliche.blogspot.com/2011/05/dazu-bin-ich-zu-katholisch.html (it's in German!).Yet the attitude of loving and sharing that Fromm forwards against the industrial attitude of having and spending is one I've been cherishing a lot in my life.
And apperently Gotye shares it also and something else I like about him is his Catholic attitude to the music he is inspired by, Soul or South American Tango etc
No comments:
Post a Comment