The Gagging of Human Creativity
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Sadhika Pant
 September 05 2023
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    The flame of creativity flickers dangerously. Prometheus’ punishment, was it all in vain?

    This is the information age. Information, information, everywhere. Constantly assaulting your senses. Information is mainstream. Access to information has never been higher. But it is not the same as access to knowledge. A lot of this information is actually anti-knowledge. 

    The advent of the search engine led to an explosion of information available to the everyman. As did social media. A hundred extraneous details about the lives of people you know far too little, and like even less, are now buzzing around in your head, even if you do not want them. Irrelevant trivia about the number of goals scored by a certain athlete in a 1972 game, or the affair between a prominent celebrity and his stepdaughter. The random useless things you end up google searching on your everyday train of thought. Just because you can, you know?

    So much so, it’s become impossible to shut out.

    Art is fading away. Where is it left? 

    In the galleries, where the more incomprehensible a painting, the more artistic it’s considered to be?

    In the theatre, where the greater the degree of depravity, the more critically acclaimed the work?

    In your head, with the endless buzzing of ideologies and extracts of pointless conversations and the most mind-numbing data about everything under the sun?

    Even in the streets, they will pull down the statues of our heroes soon. As soon as the people finish urinating on them in the name of freedom. 

    The boundaries between beautiful and depraved merged until they meant the same thing. 

    Symmetry used to be beautiful. Realism used to be beautiful. Method used to be beautiful. But that beauty is cliché as per modern definitions.

    Stream of consciousness. Excessive sentimentality. Exaggerated tragedy. Bleakness with edges blackened further in order to be recognisable. Deconstructionism. These are the new parameters. The only parameters.

    “Art doesn’t have to mean something. Art doesn’t have to be beautiful. Art doesn’t have to be understood. Art doesn’t have to have a point.” But doesn’t it, though?

    Some artists are eccentric. Maybe even all. But all eccentrics are certainly not artists. 

    How do you think creatively when your university has been stripped of its arches and gargoyles? How do you write a romantic novel in an over-sexualised world where love is ridden off as a naive distraction? How do you write poetry when you hear profanities screamed all day long? 

    When did we become so rich and poor at the same time? Will our children inherit this poverty? What a victory!

    Possibly, too many are unconcerned, even unaffected by this. Can these “stoics” carry on the legacy of human creativity? They see, and they do not flinch.

    art creativity decadence morality poetry literature cinema depravity beauty aesthetic individual information tragedy postmodernism poverty artist death
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