Romanticism vs. realism
In this blog post, you’re going to hear my current thoughts and perspective on this topic: romanticizing life vs. seeing life as is. And then, I want to get your thoughts on it from your own life contemplation. Please share with me, let’s discuss and generate more conversations around this.
Okay so, lately social media has been blowing up with artists that do an amazing job at romanticizing life. The picturesque content, capturing beautiful life moments, living the dream, you know all that jazz. It’s great. It’s beautiful. It’s what most would consider “artistic”. It’s also what “sells”. It’s also what most people want, because everyone wants to romanticize their lives. Life is too painful not to. In this sense, art, “effective marketing”, are intertwined with beautifying things, editing things to make them look more beautiful than they are, bring in the stories, the emotions, glamourize, or exaggerate certain things to make a point, or to sell you a point.
In the past, when I had studied Art in university, we would compare between Romanticism and Realism art throughout the centuries with different artists. Artists that romanticize in their work have different types of brush strokes, paint an ideal image, exaggerate certain feature to make a point, beautify people, scenery etc. In the modern day, we do the same with photoshop, editing models, marketing images, how the McDonald’s burgers pictures do not look like the real thing. Kim Kardashian’s body and Kylie Jenner’s lips. That kind of stuff.
Now, on the other side, artists who focus on real life, painting the ugliness of it, realism, their work gains popularity as well but it’s not so mainstream. Similar to our modern day era, influencers, content creators who share their vulnerability, imperfections, the reality vs. expectation pics, those things are becoming trendy as well. In my eye, there’s still some romanticism even in their effort to show real life, but I am not going to dive into that. The way that I see realism in our modern day world is, there’s suffering in the world, famine, war, violence, killing, poverty, inequality, etc etc etc. But how often do we go on to live our lives without thinking about the dark shit?
“Remember that growth often requires stepping into the unknown, and trust that you'll find your way as you continue to explore your inner landscape and connect with your soul.”
So below, is my personal contemplation of my own life experiences as of late. It’s my free writing so it’s not structured. I wrote this upon waking up, forgive me if it’s all over the place. But perhaps, you would completely understand it.
I guess yes my perspectives and the way I evaluate things are shifting. No more romanticizing… What could be the benefit of that? Looking at things more realistically, as they are. The ugly, the bad, all of it. Looking at it with raw eyes instead of rose tinted glass. It's interesting how artists like Monet, paint with romanticism and that is very attractive to look at vs. realism, it’s horrendous (or can be) lol. Maybe that’s why the human psyche likes to romanticize everything because it's easier to look at, whereas in real life, that shit can be hard and ugly. That brings me back to the movie, “Poor Things''. The scene when Bella stood at the top of the castle looking down, seeing everyone who’s suffering from hunger and famine while she’s on the top seeing rich people gambling their money away and living a rich life. I guess, we all want to be in the rich position because we get to romanticize life, where we don’t have to look at the hard things in life, like famine, starvation, violence, killing, poverty. We get to enjoy the finer things in life, which is romanticism in effect. We aim to be in and have beautiful things, and avoiding the ugly. Chasing pleasure, avoiding pain. Ultimately, escaping and avoiding real life (in Jungian’s words, the collective shadow, the collective unconscious, or the thing that the collective repress and avoid). And so just maybe, we romanticize even romantic relationships as a way to escape the real hard dark side of it, of the shadows of the human psyche, desires, greed, wants, lust, etc etc etc, I don’t know... I think we’re all searching for romanticism to simplify life, to create a sense of certainty in ourselves so that life seems easier to live. But the downside of that is when we are faced with the ugliness of life, the real hard shit, we become shocked, surprised, like it couldn’t be that way. But it is that way, it’s always been that way, we just didn’t choose to see it that way.
Okay, so that’s just my most recent contemplation of life. What are your thoughts?
