Culture thrives on
conflict and antagonism, not social harmony - a point made rather
memorably by a certain Harry Lime, says philosopher John Gray.
Does it take crisis, misery, bad luck, and if you were an American alive at the time of Hemingway, drunken loutishness, to be creative?
Take a look at this article from the UK and see what you think.
A Point of View: Are tyrants good for art?
"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."When Orson Welles spoke these lines as Harry Lime, the charismatic villain at the heart of the film The Third Man, released in 1949, Welles can't have realised how they would resonate ever after.
Read the entire article here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19202527
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| Orson Welles in The Third Man, 1948 |
