Does art imitate life, or is it the other way round?
This is akin to the question 'did the egg come first or the chicken'?
However, the question 'does art imitate life or does life imitate art' is more open to reason and philosophy, and therefore more easily established than the egg and chicken conundrum.
Just as they say 'first there was the Word and then there was God', we can definitively say that 'first there was Life and then there was Art'. So obviously it stands to reason that it is man who first, in the pre-historic stages, gave vent to his creative instincts and created, however rudimentary, the first piece of art. But over the ages, as man started creating more and more art through his imagination, his mind started playing tricks on him and then his progeny started imitating in real life what his ancestors may have created in art.
Eventually it became a vicious cycle. The creative people would create original pieces of art, in whatever medium, and others less gifted would copy them in real life, so that now it happens both ways all the time. And besides, in this age of instant coffee and instant communication and instant everything, there is little original stuff remaining – or little courage to say or do anything with a semblance of originality in it.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his essay on Self-Reliance: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
Which is why, as everything in this modern cut-throat world where technology is blazing ahead at the speed of light, the work and voice of a sound, balanced, creative and imaginative mind assumes even more importance. If the original artists were to stop thinking originally and stop creating their original and profound masterpieces, even the last straws of Art would be lost forever.
This is the age where people with an identity crisis, which fairly includes most of us, are copying a Shah Rukh Khan or a Madhuri Dixit, who have probably been copying their ideals who belonged to an older generation, who, in turn, have been copying their ideal from an even older generation. You might go to the extent of saying that man is increasingly losing touch with his inner self – or soul, if you please – and the only way to stay connected with it, or to break out of this vicious cycle, is to stand up for your convictions and do things your original way, even if the whole world seems to be against it.
That's how Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Galileo, Einstein, Paul Gauguin – to name but a few – changed the world and transformed the way people lived.
To surmise, though it does appear today that life imitates art, it certainly did not begin that way, and to stand out in this superficial world, we have no option but to silence our cluttered minds and start listening to our soul and start following our deep-seated creative instincts.
This is akin to the question 'did the egg come first or the chicken'?
However, the question 'does art imitate life or does life imitate art' is more open to reason and philosophy, and therefore more easily established than the egg and chicken conundrum.
Just as they say 'first there was the Word and then there was God', we can definitively say that 'first there was Life and then there was Art'. So obviously it stands to reason that it is man who first, in the pre-historic stages, gave vent to his creative instincts and created, however rudimentary, the first piece of art. But over the ages, as man started creating more and more art through his imagination, his mind started playing tricks on him and then his progeny started imitating in real life what his ancestors may have created in art.
Eventually it became a vicious cycle. The creative people would create original pieces of art, in whatever medium, and others less gifted would copy them in real life, so that now it happens both ways all the time. And besides, in this age of instant coffee and instant communication and instant everything, there is little original stuff remaining – or little courage to say or do anything with a semblance of originality in it.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his essay on Self-Reliance: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
Which is why, as everything in this modern cut-throat world where technology is blazing ahead at the speed of light, the work and voice of a sound, balanced, creative and imaginative mind assumes even more importance. If the original artists were to stop thinking originally and stop creating their original and profound masterpieces, even the last straws of Art would be lost forever.
This is the age where people with an identity crisis, which fairly includes most of us, are copying a Shah Rukh Khan or a Madhuri Dixit, who have probably been copying their ideals who belonged to an older generation, who, in turn, have been copying their ideal from an even older generation. You might go to the extent of saying that man is increasingly losing touch with his inner self – or soul, if you please – and the only way to stay connected with it, or to break out of this vicious cycle, is to stand up for your convictions and do things your original way, even if the whole world seems to be against it.
That's how Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Galileo, Einstein, Paul Gauguin – to name but a few – changed the world and transformed the way people lived.
To surmise, though it does appear today that life imitates art, it certainly did not begin that way, and to stand out in this superficial world, we have no option but to silence our cluttered minds and start listening to our soul and start following our deep-seated creative instincts.
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