Don Delillo’s novel Cosmopolis, chronicles the financial and social down spiral of Eric Packer’s life as he embarks on what should be a simple journey through New York City to the barbershop. Eric Packer, a financial tycoon of sorts, is the head of Packer Capital and the protagonist of the novel. His character embodies that of the typical social elite we are so familiar with such as Donald Trump or Martin Shkreli. Here we see a man who is smart, calculated, narcissistic, materially driven, and self-destructive. His exorbitant wealth is only overshadowed by his pleasure-seeking personality and his fear of uncertainty. These seem to be his biggest motivators as he grapples with the direction of his life and the empty relationships propped …show more content…
In typical New York City social elite fashion, he lives a life of excess and opulence. This behavior and lifestyle could not be more evident than when he is discussing Rothko paintings with his art dealer, Didi Fancher in the following: ‘“How many paintings in his chapel?” “I don’t know. Fourteen, fifteen.” “If they sell me the chapel, ill keep it intact. Tell them”…”But people need to see it.” Let them buy it. Let them out bid me” “Forgive the pissy way I say this. But the Rothko Chapel belongs to the world.” “It’s mine if I buy it”’ (DeLillo 28). Here we see one of the many instances where Eric completely disregards cost and spends his money to either deprive people from having something, or to just spend money for money’s sake. We also see this when he discusses the price of his penthouse apartment with Vija and when he buys as much Yen as possible. Vija asserts that spending money is itself a privilege, speaking to Eric’s apartment, “What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars?...You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. That is what you bought. And it is worth it. The number justifies itself” (DeLillio 78). This idea creates a totally, irreverent view of money, engraining the idea of money as an end in itself. With regards to the problem of the yen, Vija appears to view Eric’s decision regarding the problem more as a matter of his identity than one of
... the visitor. Conspicuous consumption is exemplified through this painting and the museum because it was basically all created by overbuying and greed. It can be said that the single very reason anybody sees that painting hung on the wall of a misfit room in a disorganized museum is only because of one man’s extreme case of money flaunting in an age where everything needed to be big and flashy. Also this painting was created smack dab in the middle of the Gilded Age. The painting itself has no direct connection to this era but it makes an argument for why the piece is hung in the museum.
‘Dad said that in Nurralloo we were surrounded by Philistines who wouldn’t know a good painting if it jumped up and bit them, but at the pub they hung one of his small watercolours, a sketch he called it, and Dad got free beers. He said by the time I was sixteen, we’d be rich. We’d celebrate my birthday in Paris, the city of art and lovers. Mum said, ‘Don’t put ideas in her head Dave Grainger. Chrissie, don’t listen to him,’ and flicked her tea towel at him but later she pulled down one of Dad’s art books and showed me paintings of people dancing in Paris and a Paris pub which looked posher than the Station Hotel.’
Tobias Wolff’s “The Rich Brother” is a story of two brothers, Donald and Pete. These brothers have very contrasting lifestyles; Pete is a successful businessman with a wife and kids. Donald, on the other hand, is an outcast. He’s unemployed and irresponsible. He lives his life as a vagabond. Despite these facts, the successful brother, Pete, still lacks the self-esteem he desperately craves. Therefore he tries to make his brother, Donald, feel foolish with every chance he gets.
In order to add something to their lives, [black families] decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors. I've been asked, is anyone in my family artistically inclined? I've always felt ashamed of my response and I always said no, not realizing that my artistic sensibility came from this ambiance.... It's only in retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by art. You'd walk Seventh Avenue and took in the windows and you'd see all these colors in the depths of the depression. All these colors.
Although Fitzgerald glamorises the lifestyles of the rich minority, he also asks us to question how attractive money really is, by conveying. to us the destruction and unhappiness that huge wealth can cause. underneath its dazzling exterior. We are led through the various events of the novel by our narrator. Nick Carraway, who is also Gatsby's neighbour.... ...
The temptation is to analyze and compare these novels in terms of American consumerism at different times, the individual’s quest for self-identity in the increasingly conformist capitalist structure, or to focus on literary aspects, such as character and narrative structure. However, these obvious subjects seem secondary to an overarching thematic similarity. Both novels are masculine narratives, where the male protagonists (Jay Gatsby and Tyler Durden), and the narrators (Nick Caraway and an unnamed Narrator) run toward or away from one of two versions of hyper-masculinity. One version is the wild, angry, sexual and raw fighter who uses the brute power of his body to crush the emasculating circumstances of a middle class American lifestyle. The second version of hyper-masculinity is the immaculate, well-dressed, refined and civilized man who uses extravagant displays of wealth and material possessions to crush the emasculating circumstances of the rugged and humble American life of a small town boy.... ...
Leonard Bernstein was born into a family full of “constant fighting” between his parents—Russian immigrants Jennie and Samuel Bernstein (Peyser 21). His father escaped Ukraine at the age of sixteen and struggled in the United States, working menial jobs until he finally built a successful business in distributing beauty products (Peyser 20). Thus, Leonard grew up with the understanding that financial stability was essential to one’s future; therefore, to his parents, music and arts were a waste of time because art-based careers had little job security.
Mark Rothko is recognized as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and during his lifetime was touted as a leading figure in postwar American painting. He is one of the outstanding figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the creators of Color Field Painting. As a result of his contribution of great talent and the ability to deliver exceptional works on canvas one of his final projects, the Rothko Chapel offered to him by Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, would ultimately anchor his name in the art world and in history. Without any one of the three, the man, the work on canvas, or the dream, the Rothko Chapel would never have been able to exist for the conceptualization of the artist, the creations on canvas and the architectural dynamics are what make the Rothko Chapel a product of brilliance.
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader, both tell the same story about a man who is lonely and blames the world around him for his loneliness. The characters of Underground Man and Travis Bickle mirror each other; they both live in the underground, narrating their respective stories, experiencing aches and maladies which they leave unchecked, seeing the city they live in as a modern-day hell filled with the fake and corrupt. However, time and again both Travis and the Underground Man contradict themselves. While the underground character preaches his contempt for civilization—the ‘aboveground’—and the people within it, he constantly displays a deep-seeded longing to be a part of it. Both characters believe in a strong ideal that challenges that of the city’s, an ideal that is personified by the character of the prostitute.
The film Basquiat explores the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Haitian-Puerto Rican painting in New York City during the 1980s. Working closely with Andy Warhol, Basquiat was exploited for his unique “urban ghetto” graffiti and crude style of representation. Schnabel’s film further exploits this image of the painter, depicting him in various scenes of poverty and drug addiction, dirty poor love and desperation. Our understanding of the artist is framed by excerpts from essays by art critic Rene Ricard, depicted as a flaming homosexual who leeches off of his artistic friends. Ricard observes the hypocrisy and self-indulgence of the art scene that is vital to...
Despite their numerous connections, there is great conflict between the different economic classes in The Great Gatsby, those being old money, new money, and the scarcely discussed, no money. Separated by the lake, West Egg and East Egg never cease to oppose one another. Fitzgerald shows the effect excessive capital has on people, emphasizing that money is power. Since Tom Buchanan comes from old money, his family fortune has simply been passed onto him; he doesn’t have to work to achieve his social status. Conversely, Jay Gatsby is required to put in the hard work and go to the extremes to get where he is. Tom Buchanan can easily be compared to the well-known Paris Hilton. What great successes is she truly known for? Solely being related to the founder of Hilton Hotels, she has never truly had to make a name for herself. When it comes to Gatsby, if one is capable of overlooking his illegal means of doing so, he is forced to work for his fortune. Steve Jobs, in comparison, also worked for his money, having originally begun his billion dollar company in his garage.
In "Vissi d'Arte" a talented playwright living in seedy Times Square sacrifices everything good in his life for his still-unfinished masterpiece, which is then crushed by a Hollywood sharpie. The story revolves around a wife of a struggling painter in a state of like, not love, with her slightly insane husband. Writing plays is what Harry had the most passion for and everything besides that he just simply liked it. He was very stuck up when things didn’t go the way he wanted. He likes to be in charge so when someone mentions or tells him to do something he becomes stern and stays with his ways instead of changing them. He did love something in his life but it wasn’t fully pointed at Breckie. Being told he had to shorten his stories he decided to stop writing for newspapers and articles instead of changing a small thing. Breckie was sick of the life they were living she began getting upset and frustrated living there. “I’m talking you get a job, we get an apartment in a building wired for cable, and we have a real life. I can wait for you only so long.”(23) She felt tied down living there she wanted to get out and start a new and better life. She insisted they leave but Harry was hesitant. When Breckie brought this to his attention he wasn’t sold on the idea of moving. Th...
...s an artist but when he wasn’t accepted into art school he started to hate all art that wasn’t landscape paintings. He ordered an art burning in March 1939 setting over a thousand of paintings on fire. Organizations collected Jewish books and had a mass book burning, described on pages 108-113 in The Book Thief.
-the refuge of art: his diary, the car, the hotels, his confession, and finally the novel.
The “privileged minority” mystifies works of art in order to control people’s view. Berger explains how Hals becomes after he painted the two paintings. According to Berger, “he obtained three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. Those who now sat for him were administrators of such public charity” (158).