Spectacular! But what about the content?

Partha Pratim Acharya

Aristotle told about ‘Spectacle’ as the last of the six elements that constitute the finest of arts. Though he is an honourable man yet who cares about his before Christ’s gibberish in a post-modern era? Another man from the 19^th century tells that the industrialized society is making hollow men, robbed of their humanity as they have lost their creativity thanks to their bolt like existence in the giant machine like production system. But who cares?

At least the recent dominance of flamboyancy in creative writings, be it poems, plays or movies, will definitely bear testimony to this. Of course, I am not stating that there is nothing in the creative domain that gives proper emphasis to the content. Yes, there are some.But those are rivulets

in comparison to the oceanic presence of the former type

Recently the reverberation of this spectacular display devoid of content is surpassing every historical record. Now polemical debaters can have space here by citing only one expected proposition that this writer has forgotten that even in those Spectacular creative displays there is certain Content. But here I categorically want to state that my premise is only to show how Forms are being given upper hands to Content. Besides, to me, the function of art is to depict the culture amid which an individual exists. Seems complicated? Let me elaborate that. What is the source of any creation? It is an individual’s perception of the world through his sensory organs. The stimuli which are experienced by an individual in his journey through this world. Myriads of stimuli interact in the individual’s brain forming his outlook to see the world, analyze it and creating something. The primacy of Form over Content has its root in the stimuli that individuals are experiencing from the social system around him….

To be continued