"Creativity thrives in times of upheaval, and many of us now certainly feel the ground shifting under our feet. For the foreseeable future, we'll be living with and governed by a "whirlwind of negativity," as the artist Sylvia Maier terms the phenomenon. How will this continuing climate of uncertainty affect the ways we conceive of and produce art and culture in the time to come?"
""I am finding words are failing my mouth, leaving me in an increasingly non-verbal state of existence," wrote the artist Katya Grokhofsky shortly after Donald Trump's surprise 2016 victory. "Fingers twitching, feet bound, dust settling in my eyes and ears, my languages are not sufficient." Welcome to the shock event, engineered to jar the political system and civil society, causing disruption among the public and the political class that aids the leader in consolidating his power."
"Born from Germany's defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) is often thought of as a cultural golden age. It may call to mind images of personal emancipation and creative experimentation. Gay-friendly nightlife; the aural stimulation of twelve-tone music; the visceral impact of Otto Dix and Käthe Kollwitz; the drunken rush of modernity, and its dystopian potential, as immortalized in experimental films like Fritz Lang's "Metropolis.""
Overlapping crises—war, displacement, ecological collapse, and rising authoritarianism—create conditions in which creativity often intensifies rather than diminishes. Artists report linguistic failure and non-verbal reactions after political shock events, producing work born from visceral responses and constrained languages. Historical analogues such as the Crisis of the Third Century and Weimar Germany demonstrate how cultural experimentation can flourish amid national trauma. The Weimar era combined personal emancipation, avant-garde music, provocative visual art, and dystopian cinema while retaining the imprint of World War I. Shock events disrupt political systems and civil society, both enabling power consolidation and provoking urgent artistic responses.
Read at Documentjournal
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