Thursday, June 24, 2010

Cosmopolitan (article)

Defining the word cosmopolitan from the artistic point of view could be a handful. This is my own attempt.
We already know that the world is getting more cosmopolitan by the day especially as the reality of the term global village comes to bear on us.
Cities are striving to be more cosmopolitan as they add on in years and as they expand. Now not every city is cosmopolitan but as they expand and people keep on trooping in from the nooks and crannies....they move towards cosmopolitanism.
That is the underlying current that defines the cosmopolitan city i.e. people. And it is not just people but a melting pot of diverseness. The more diverse they are, the more cosmopolitan that city tends to be.

                                                       cosmopolitan
                                                    
And looking at the art-work, cosmopolitanism is an embedding of two "extensialisms". The first extension we are going to call dis-engagement and the second we are going to call engagement.
These two distinct functions has to take place before cosmopolitanism within a city can be achieved. This is simply because cities are made up of individual entities. But these entities usually have roots outside of the city. So they first of all have to dis-engage from those roots before they can now engage into the new environment and culture of city life. The greater the degree of dis-engagement, the greater the degree of engagement. The two must work in pari pasu (sorry i got carried away...hand in hand).
The inter-play of  dis-engagement and engagement and it building up till it reaches a critical mass that births cosmopolitan cities.
An interesting point of note here is that the more cosmopolitan  a city become the less xenophobic that city (i.e. as a single organism) becomes. This is why the art work is an interplay of colors representing a mixture of various individualities within the context of their native roots and them letting go of issues that ties them down to those roots as the move on to fully engage in true cosmopolitanism.

NB There is still much to be said about this...may be we might just extend to next week.

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