European Social and Cultural Trends

1
European Social and Cultural Trends

• Late 20th Century

2
European Population Trends

• European birth rates are for the most part
  dropping
• Europe has an aging population

3
Migration of 20th Century People

• Decolonization led people to leave colonies and
  return to their homeland (e.g. Great Britain
  received thousands of immigrants from its former
  colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and India
• Racial tensions arrive as many working class
  people resent the new immigrants
• Extreme right-wing group National Front in France
  runs Jean-Marie Le Pen in a losing election to
  Jacques Chirac in 2002
• Similar racist movements arise in many other
  European countries

4
The New Muslim Population

• Immigration of Muslims into Europe come from two
  chief sources
• European economic growth labor shortages lead
  some European nations to invite guest workers
  to their country
• Decolonization Muslims from India and Africa
  come to Britain, while Muslims from Algeria come
  to France

Salman Rushdie, Muslim Indian-British author of
The Satanic Verses
5
Muslim Culture

• Muslim immigrants for the most part remain
  unassimilated and self-contained, with the women
  remaining at home
• European Muslims are not homogeneous coming from
  different class countries, class backgrounds and
  different Islamic traditions
• The presence of foreign-born Muslims whose labor
  is necessary for the prosperity of the European
  economy is a major issue in contemporary Europe.
• Many of these Muslims, such as these women, live
  in self-contained communities.

6
Christians of the 20th Century and Today

• Neo-Orthodoxy presented by Karl Barth, it
  reemphasized the transcendence of God and the
  dependence of humankind on the divine
• Liberal theology Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann,
  John Robinson and C.S. Lewis all regarded
  religion as a human phenomenon, where divinity is
  sought in human nature and culture

7
Vatican II

• A Roman Catholic reform movement
• More liberal ideas in recent times have included
  Mass celebrated in the vernacular languages and
  freer relations with other Christian
  denominations and Judaism
• Conservative ideas kept celibacy of priests,
  prohibition on abortion and birth control, and no
  women priests
• Pope John Paul II emphasized the traditionalist
  doctrine, firm stands against communism and
  growth of the church in the non-Western world ,
  while emphasizing social justice

8

• Throughout his pontificate John Paul II continued
  a close relationship with his native Poland to
  which he made several visits.
• The earliest of these was important in
  demonstrating the authority of the church against
  Polish communist authorities.
• Shown here in his Polish visit of June 1999, the
  pope would celebrate mass before several hundred
  thousand Poles after the collapse of communism
  which had occurred a decade earlier.

9
Western Culture Feminism

• Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex,
  exploring the differences being a women made in
  her life
• feminist journals published starting in the
  1970s
• emphasis in movement in women controlling their
  own lives

10
New Work Patterns

• childcare demands decreased by compulsory
  education and better health care
• some women financially felt they had to go to
  work
• women go to work when their children are old
  enough to go to school
• women go back to work after their children have
  grown
• women have less children and have children later
  in life so there is an increase in the work force

11
Women in the New Eastern Europe

• many of the nations have shown little concern for
  womens issues
• economic difficulties in the region limited the
  amount health and welfare programs

12
Art Movements Modernism

• The term encompasses the activities and output of
  those who felt the "traditional" forms of art,
  architecture, literature, religious faith, social
  organization and daily life were becoming
  outdated in the new economic, social and
  political conditions of an emerging fully
  industrialized world.
• Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of
  Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the
  existence of a compassionate, all-powerful
  Creator.
• This is not to say that all modernists or
  modernist movements rejected either religion or
  all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that
  modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the
  axioms of the previous age.
• The modernist artists we have already studied
  included the works of post-impressionists,
  Dadaists, surrealists, etc.

13
Modern Thought

• From a literary perspective, the main
  characteristics of modernism include
• 1. an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity
  in writing (and in visual arts as well) an
  emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception
  itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is
  perceived. An example of this would be
  stream-of-consciousness writing.
• 2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity
  provided by omniscient third-person narrators,
  fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut
  moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated
  stories are an example of this aspect of
  modernism.
• 3. a blurring of distinctions between genres, so
  that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S.
  Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic
  (as in Woolf or Joyce).
• 4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous
  narratives, and random-seeming collages of
  different materials.
• 5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or
  self-consciousness, about the production of the
  work of art, so that each piece calls attention
  to its own status as a production, as something
  constructed and consumed in particular ways.
• 6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in
  favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of
  William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in
  large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in
  favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.
• 7. A rejection of the distinction between "high"
  and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of
  materials used to produce art and in methods of
  displaying, distributing, and consuming art.

14
T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• Modernist Poet
• Lived in Europe in the early to mid 1900s
• http//www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

15
E.E. Cummings Snow

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16
Existentialism

• belief that holds human beings totally
  responsible for their acts and that this
  responsibility causes dread and anguish
• Soren Kierkegaard Danish writer maintained
  Christianity could be grasped only by lives
  caught in extreme situations / questioned whether
  human beings are in control of their own destiny

17
Questioning of Rationalism by Existentialists

• famous writers Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers,
  Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus all questioned
  the primacy of reason and scientific
  understanding
• according to the existentialists, human beings
  are compelled to formulate their own ethical
  values and cannot depend on traditional religion,
  rational philosophy, intuition, or social customs
  for ethical guidance

Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
18
Post-Modernism

• Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary
  culture characterized by the rejection of
  objective truth and global cultural narrative.
• It emphasizes the role of language, power
  relations, and motivations
• in particular it attacks the use of sharp
  classifications such as male versus female,
  straight versus gay, white versus black, and
  imperial versus colonial.
• Jaques Derrida and Michael Foucault are classic
  examples of postmodern philosophers
• Had its height in the 1960s-1990s

19
Art since World War II

• Cultural divisions and the Cold War
• Tatjiana Yablonskaya in Bread (1949), showed the
  realistic propaganda of the Stalinist regime
• Jackson Pollack in One(1950), he showed the
  exuberance and freedom of abstract drip painting

20
More Postmodern Art Jackson Pollack

• During the late 1940s and early 1950s Pollock's
  radical approach to painting revolutionized the
  potential for all Contemporary art that followed
  him.
• To some extent Pollock realized that the journey
  toward making a work of art was as important as
  the work of art itself.
• Pollacks work No. 5

21
Pop Art

• The term "Pop Art" was used to describe paintings
  that celebrated consumerism of the post World War
  II era.
• This movement rejected Abstract expressionism and
  its focus on the psychological interior, in favor
  of art which depicted, and often celebrated
  material consumer culture, advertising, and
  iconography of the mass production age
• One way that Pop art is postmodern is that it
  breaks down what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great
  Divide" between high art and popular culture
• Made famous by Andy Warhol and others

22
Minimalism

• Rachel Whiteread used the art concept of
  minimalism (the movement in architecture to
  remove from an object as many features as
  possible while retaining the objects form) in
  her Nameless Library which commemorates the
  65,000 Austrian Jews killed by Nazi Germany

23
Post-Minimalism

• Performance art that changed with environmental
  conditions.
• Brought attention to environmental conditions

24
Americanization of Europe

• the spread of American influences in the economy,
  military, and culture to Europe
• companies such as McDonalds , Apple. Starbucks,
  and the Gap have outlets all over Europe
• music, movies and television shows from the U.S.
  have also come to Europe
• has been met by some resentment by people who do
  not want to lose their European culture

25
Environmentalism

• concerns about pollution grows in the 1970s and
  1980s
• Green Party an influential political party that
  started in Germany and were concerned about
  global warming and pollution
• Green movement is anti-capitalist and
  anti-nuclear
• Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia in 1986
  raised questions about nuclear power that Europe
  could not ignore

26
In 1989, when a supertanker spilled 35,000 tons
of crude oil into Alaskas Prince William Sound,
rescue workers struggled to save the lives of
seabirds and animals. Nevertheless, thousands
died. Ron Levy/Liaison Agency, Inc.
27
The Computer Age

• late nineteenth century the invention of the
  calculator improves businesses and the cash
  register appears in the late 1920s
• first actual computer Electronic Numerical
  Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) built for
  ballistics calculations for the U.S. army in 1946
• dates
• 1960s invention of the bitmap to cover the
  screen, the mouse and the microchip
• 1982 IBM produces small personal computer
• 1984 Apple produces the Macintosh computer
  for a desktop at home or office and set for
  commercial sales becomes available
• mid-1980s computer sales boom
• mid 1990s - present the internet boom

28
The earliest computers were very large. Here in a
1946 photograph J. Presper Eckert and J. W.
Mauchly stand by the Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) which was
dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania Moore
School of Electrical Engineering.
CORBIS/Bettmann
29
Modern Art

• Art in the current day tends to use common
  objects in new ways and to use computers to
  synthesize new ways of looking at things

30
More Modern Art
31
Photorealism

• Realism has made a resurgence as well with
  Photorealism
• Yes, this is an oil painting not a photograph