Art Gallery

About two centuries ago, the Industrial Revolution germinated in Europe as a beacon of progress. The pace of life took on a new rhythm, and populations flocked from rural to urban spaces. The human race took greater strides than ever anticipated. And yet, this very beacon of progress also loomed like a storm cloud over English skies.

London was full to her brim with the jostling populace. Her lungs were filling with smoke from the factories. For humanity, the passage of time was now bound by clocks and labour shifts. Technology had undoubtedly progressed – but at what cost?

At such a time of sociopolitical upheaval, the Romantic artists came to the forefront as the prophets of the hour. The prophetic power of the artist is born from their inherent harmony with the world. When man’s alienation with nature was intensifying, the Romantic poets fought to be in tune with the cosmos that cradles us. Because while science and technology had held up a lantern to illuminate the workings of the world, the light unfortunately demystified everything it touched. That which is sacred was reduced to atoms. While Reason holds the power to reveal, it often reduces the magical to the mundane. And so, the Romantics fought to imbue the mundane once again with magic. In Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth writes–

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And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

This presence that “rolls through all things” is both humbling and uplifting. It humbles the hubris of man, and uplifts the spirit by including us in the grand scheme of things. It teaches us to contemplate not only on the world and our place in it, but also on Duty, Work, and Progress. To ensure that our creations enrich rather than impoverish the earth and its inhabitants – that is now the goal for both artists and entrepreneurs. Art and technology are both creations born from “the mind of man.”