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Home | What is Hello Culture? | The grid | The interviews | Find out more | Credits
To experience the heyday and remnants of Romanticism — and to take a cold shower with the Realists — here is the Hello Culture grid.
More than 160 entries are organised under eight categories -heroes and heroines, gurus, tribes, movements, music, film, art, literature and poetry — and seven themes:
Freedom/wildness The passionate, poetic, revolutionary individual The wild landscape outside and the wild feelings within.
Madness To rise above the lowly plane and on to a higher one, to glimpse something profound, to see the truth of existence, not just illusions and veils. To do this through the working (or non-working) of your own mind or with the assistance of drugs.
Badness Something we demand from artists. Famous people behave badly and people behave badly to become famous. Appetite is all — but with flair.
Blackness Exotic otherness. Whites' attempts to assume a black identity or siphon off blackness as a cultural value. Black-made reflections of a black world.
Nihilism Terror of the darkness, of the void below, of nothing existing behind illusion except darkness. Negation. Spiritual blankness.
Celebrity Once was awarded for representing higher values, now is the icon of success in an utterly value-free world.
Realism 'Truth to the observed facts of life (especially when they are gloomy)': a term generally only used in contradiction to some other, more exotic movement Š such as Romanticism.
All the entries have short biographies/descriptions of their subjects, plus websites and books if you want to find out more.
This grid is by no means the last word — it is designed to give you a taste of the experimentation and danger that Romanticism still has the power to evoke.