I am the Creator of My Reality Artistic Exploration: A Guide towards Self-Creation

Kate Holmes

Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Clark, Maribeth

Keywords

Self, Reality, Art, Consciousness

Area of Concentration

General Studies

Abstract

This thesis began as an interest in an emerging revolution in thought that has been culminating since the beginning of the 20th Century. The western world is becoming more inclusive, allowing for the cohabitation of previously dichotomous elements. East and West have met somewhere in the middle, the sacred and profane now overlap, the self is an indestructible aspect of society and art is stepping to the forefront of transcendental experience. The Introduction raises points about selfanalysis and the artist's hyper-reflective nature through the relationship between Salvador Dal� and Sigmund Freud. The first chapter discusses first the ideas of a psychiatrist, Bruno Bettelheim on the issue of art as a tool for transformation, then David Mandel, who focuses on art's potential as a catalyst for conscious human evolution. The second chapter focuses on a more western modernist conceptualization of the artist with Thomas Mann�s Death in Venice, comparing the character Gustav von Aschenbach to the Orpheus of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. This chapter touches on concepts of the artist as an isolated being who transverses the realms of opposites and remains on the outside of human experience. The third chapter attempts to bring the artist back home to humanness and back into the human sphere, allowing for the artist's individuality and exhibiting the individual (non-artist) as the artist of life through Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and Rilke's Duino Elegies. The conclusion allows for the individual within the context of the whole; the world is nothing without those who view it, and we are nothing without the world. Life is the ultimate art form and what each one of us choose to do with our portion of it effects us all and determines our individuality.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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