Alexandra York pleads in her essay "From the Fountainhead to the Future" for representationalism in the visual arts, tonality and melody in music, grace and intelligible expressiveness of movement in dance, and the reverberating interaction of structure, rhythm and meaning in written works. She boldly argues that art as a shortcut to philosophy can be a savior of human values.
She boldly asserts, "Art imbued with beauty that expresses life-serving values and humanistic ideas (and ideals) is a potent manifestation of that light, the same philosophical flame ignited in ancient Greece, rekindled during the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment and reflected across all civilizations ever since in a myriad of forms that celebrate individual achievement and excellence." The challenge is, as the writer says, to express "the best within us" through works of art that project the world at its most beautiful and man and woman in their most noble state.
About the writer Alexandra York
Born in New
York, Alexandra York is the founding president of American Renaissance for the
Twenty-first Century (ART), a nonprofit educational foundation devoted to a
rebirth of beauty and life-affirming values in all of the arts. In addition to
authoring six nonfiction books, Alexandra has also been published in magazine
and newspaper articles, book and movie reviews, and poetry.
York
dismisses twentieth century fashionable topics like primitivism, nihilism,
deconstructionism and political correctness and advocates revitalizing the
fundamental tenets of ancient Greek heritage.
Summary of the essay From the Fountainhead to the Future
The writer,
Alexandra York is the founding president of the American Renaissance in the art
for the twenty-first century. She frankly rejects twentieth-century
primitivism, nihilism, and deconstruction. She thinks that visual arts should
represent the outer world. She says that melody, tonality, and harmony should
be in music, and rhythm, meaning, and idea should be in written works.
Moreover,
she claims that written art should have positive content. For her, Greek art
had moral and spiritual parts. The Greek ideal was personal character, physical
fitness, and spiritual wholeness. In most of America's short history, the same
types of individual excellence could be guessed but by the early 1950s,
individualism focused only on money and along with it, people became
self-centered. Then morality changed into pragmatism, tolerance turn into
permissiveness, individual freedom turns into license and objective judgment of
art changed into subjective. The objective standard of judgment was ridiculed.
As a result, 20th-century American iconoclasts became nihilists.
Now, at the
end of this century, people praised politics and had to attain maximum
satisfaction. There is a division between black and white, men and women, mind
and body, art and meaning.
Today, media
monger lacks faith in spirituality. They rush to find out serial killers,
rapists, and so on. According to the writer, we live in an emotional crisis
world. Family bonds and ties are secondary while money has become the center of
happiness. So, York thinks that it is essential to have emotional fuel to
correct us. It means that not only the mind, heart, and soul should also be
nurtured.
According to
her, beauty possesses redemptive powers of its own but if beauty is created by
the human hand, it can be more redemptive and more powerful. To be beauty in
art, there should be put reason, ideas, and logic so that it becomes meaningful
to us. She praises high art because it gives deep and universality of
humanistic meaning. As a result, it becomes beyond time and place.
Beauty helps
to get an aesthetic arrest. It can be in both natural and manmade objects.
Painters and writers should use ideas in art that makes the art trustworthy and
reasonable. She supports Renaissance Europeans because they did not try to
repeat the Greek ideal but tried to give rebirth of ideas. She advocates that
instead of copying Greek art, we need to give freshness and innovativeness to
the art.
In brief,
Renaissance Europeans did not revive the Greek art but they gave rebirth in
their own context and parameters. They did not copy the Apollo (Greek Ideal)
but gave rebirth in their own context, David (European context).
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From the Fountainhead to the Future [Question answer]
1. What are the elements of beauty,
according to the writer?
Ans: According to the writer, the element of beauty is:
it should incite aesthetic arrest, and should fuse logic and melody. In other
words, visual art should be representational, and in music, there should be
tonality and melody, and so on.
2. How does York think heart and soul
can be nurtured?
Ans: Heart and soul can be nurtured by championing
beautiful and life-affirming art and the ideas that inspire it.
3. What divisions are prevalent in
contemporary society? What can be done to address this malady?
Ans: In contemporary society, there are many divisions
between black and white, men and women, mind and body, reason and emotion, art
and meaning. To address such a malady, I think that emotional fuel i.e.,
nurturing body and soul are essential.
4. How does York extol the virtues of
"high art" (6)?
Ans: She extols the virtues of high art by saying that in
such art, there is maximum involvement of beauty and aesthetics that purely
represent the outer world.
5. Explain what the writer means when
she says that the age in which we live is "emotionally conflicted"
(4).
Ans: Today, due to emotional conflict, we rarely think to
explore the soul of heroes, creators, and achievers. Our art and most of our
institutions reflect this conflict. Emotionally conflicted means a lack of
valid values to guide us. We are lingering in false alternatives of emotional
indulgence or emotional denial.
6. How does the writer establish the
value of beauty and how does she understand beauty?
Ans: Beauty can be the charm and the vehicle to make the
art aesthetic. Art expresses life by serving humanistic values. As a result,
art becomes sublime, timeless, and immortal in the heart of the people.
7. How is individual liberty related
to a rebirth of positive art and ideas?
Ans: Artists should have complete freedom to create art.
As a result, using an inventive mind he can create fresh, original, positive
art.
8. Explain: "Ours should be a
declarative step toward establishing a nation-wide, cooperative endeavor to
create a rebirth (not a revival) of positive art and ideas that will give
"expression to the new mood ... vigorous and revitalizing" (12)
Ans: Above extract is trying to say that we should not be
slaves to other art but try to create something new. Instead of revitalizing
the past art, it is better to give rebirth. The writer supports the rebirth of
art but she hates the revitalization of past arts.
9. Why do we need art to create a
mood of "renewed celebration" (13)?
Ans: We need to provide renewed celebration to give
reality and to make art creative and constructive.
10. In the last sentence of paragraph
9, Alexandra York says that society is "becoming more illiterate by the
minute." What hints and suggestions do you find in the text that leads to
this conclusion?
Ans: In the last sentence of paragraph 9, Alexandra York
says that the society is " becoming more illiterate by the minute that
hints: we are poor in heart and have lost the spiritual faith. To correct us,
we should have enlightenment and spiritual renewal.
11. How can beauty be turned against
itself? Do you consider the exposure of the human body in modern advertisements
an instance of beauty turned against itself?
Ans: Yes, I do. The amount of partially and fully exposed
to the human body in modern advertisements has severely increased over the
years and is more popular now than ever. Advertisers use sex as a tool to draw
additional attention to a specific product and are known to be one of the most
persuasive tools used by both marketers and advertising Sex and sexism
advertising justify, as marketers target young audiences with sexual appeals
and marketers use sexual imagery to sell products to teenagers and young
adults. The effect of sexual content in advertising may be heightened for young
adults, for whom sexual expression and experiences are still relatively new and
therefore sexual content is often targeted at young adults.
12. We need a rebirth of art, not a
mere revival (12). Explain.
Ans: We need a rebirth of art but not a more revival. It means
we should not copy and paste the same art at present but by studying past art,
we should give fresh, original art. Rebirth stands for originality and newness
while revival is related to repetition. In other words, Renaissance Europeans
made the rebirth of the Greek ideal in their own context. They redefined the
Greek ideal to suit their own needs.
They express
such ideals in their own content (David, not Apollo). In other words, they
express ancient Greek civilization, ideals, and the concept of beauty in the
European context. If they express the context of Apollo (Greek) in the European
context, it would be revival but they study their own context so that
renaissance European is the rebirth of the Greek ideal.