The exciting boring decade
Why hasn’t all the chaos in the real world inspired more interesting art?
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The big summer films – The Odyssey (pictured) and Spider-Man: Brand New Day – are reworkings of old intellectual property.
PHOTO: UIP
Janan Ganesh
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” – The Third Man.
Harsh on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Le Corbusier, I’ve always thought. But let us go with the premise for a moment. Shouldn’t the world be enjoying an artistic bonanza right now? If there is a link between social strife and creative breakthroughs, there has been enough of the first – Brexit, Donald Trump, Covid-19, Ukraine, Iran – to trigger the second.
