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How useful do you find ideas of utopia and dystopia in understanding Neo-Impressionism?

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Downloads to date: N/A | Words: 1800 | Submitted: 2005-01-31

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On one hand, frivolity is stripped to reveal a core of oppression, on the other physical monumentality is enhanced until its forms resonate with spiritual significance. Ridicule is set firmly at the feet of the bourgeoise, magnifying the hopelessness of their efforts to be hopeful.

The pervasive sense of disillusionment with the present place and time is evidenced in the desperate hunt for utopias in anti-materialistic, non-civilised societies and practices. It seems that people would rather be anywhere else, at any other time, but, having "bought into" the fashions and materialism of modernity, the public are infected with corresponding pride and manners that instruct a fidelity to consumerism. In one extreme, a guilty anxiety drives the claim to righteousness of one's decisions and the relative amorality of the lifestyle manifests as the thematisation of "better" places as physically or spiritually "beyond" material existence, and consequently entirely unattainable, as with Gaugin. In another means of sidestepping the amorality of modern life, a lively and spontaneous technique show it to be exciting and desirable, indeed already idyllic, as with Renoir.

It shall become apparent that Seurat's work is neither defensively utopic nor desperately escapist.
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