Alternate art history?

Putting this in Pre-1900, but it could go anywhere, really.

I was wondering what people think about the influence of artists on history.

For example, how would the world be different without Shakespeare? Would it actually be all that different? It's hard to think of any world-changing events that have been precipitated or avoided by the works of 'Shakky-P' (as he's known on the street - or 'Wizzle M Shizzle' to his crew).

On the other hand, he has perhaps been, more subtly, one of the great influences of the last 300 or so years on they way British people think of themselves and define their values.

So basically, I was wondering whether anybody could think of a work of art that has had a concrete influence on world events. And in general whether people think that works of art actually make history, or whether they just reflect it.
 

Tielhard

Banned
A very hard question and a subtle one.

The first point I would like to make is that the line between literature and philosophy is vague and the distance between art and propaganda is not that far either. For example Marx, squarely out of the literature camp and in with the philosophers, but what about Rand and even Bob Heinlein where do you classify them? What about 'The Gadfly'? If Guernica and Goya are art what then of Gillray and 'Raising The Banner'?

A few obvious ones republican France would be a very different place without 'Marianne'. America would be a different place without Besty Ross (is sowing art?). Ireland would not have won her feedom without the Gaelic sorts and arts movement. The influence of Che as a symbol of the internationalisation of revolution would not nearly be so great without his iconisation in to a christ like figure. Spain, what would have developed without the geometric art of Al Andalus?
 
Fair point, of course - skating dangerously close to not-very-historical discussion: What Is Art?

Hard as it is to admit it, I suppose you have to count allegorists like Rand and Henlein as artists, if you are going to admit Voltaire and Orwell.

Stretching the point, I suppose you could go all post-modern and consider advertising an art form, and I can certainly think of adverts that have changed history, even if only on a small scale. (But then my head starts to hurt.)

Thanks for the examples - just what I was looking for.

Question still remains whether any of these things work independently of their cultural setting. Was the Gaelic arts movement a cause of Irish Nationalism or a symptom?

Michelangelo's David might be one possibility, since I seem to remember it was the focal point of a number of episodes of politically-motivated violence.
 
Art reflects elements of its society. To ask whether art is a reflection of society or one of its driving forces is rather like the chicken and the egg question. The answer,then, is yes.

Without Shakespere most of our language would be very different and poorer (he coined so many words and phrases it is almost incredible). So all subsequent literature and written works like political and social manifestos, are directly indebted to his art.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
If you study art history and particularly it's influence on....uh...history one of the first considerations that modernity forces upon you is the question of just how much the medium really is the message.

William Blake, if his ideas on religion and reality had percolated to the common man, would almost certainly have brought something like the psychedelic revolution hundreds of years earlier. Yet he composed for a few financially favored patrons, most of whom had little understanding or appreciation for his work, so an idea that had been realized and discarded centuries gone came to a shallow and tawdry end for lack of its guiding genius, 200 years later.

Interesting, what if Hemingway were called back to punch up the latest edition of Medal of Honor? What kind of anime would Shakespeare write?
 
John Milton was well aware that he was one of the great geniuses of his age, and that the epic poem he was about to commence would be his magnum opus. He narrowed his choices down to two, and rejected an Arthurian epic in favor of Paradise Lost, the greatest poem in the English language. As much as I admire Paradise Lost, I think the Arthurian epic would have been fascinating. Imagine how Milton's experience of the Civil War and Cromwell would have impacted an epic concerned with a King. He might have become the Virgil of Great Britain, with his work having a very real and demonstrable effect on the polity.
 
Ooh, Blake's a good 'un for this. Romantics generally, in fact - Wordsworth and Byron were both (almost accidentally, I think, in WW's case) quite politically influential.

(Incidentally, Milton's Arthurian interests owed a lot to Spenser, I think. And I think the existence of The Faerie Queene was a factor in pushing him towards Paradise Lost. Another thing for which to blame Spenser!) :)

Basically, I'm still having trouble thinking of a "WI xxx had never been born" (where xxx is an artist) that gives a substantially/interestingly divergent timeline. And I wonder if that's because artists reflect rather than cause historical upsets (or just because of lack of imagination on my part!)
 
Okay, so my POD is that Charlotte and Emily Bronte both live longer (in OTL they die young).

Among other books, Charlotte writes the notorious Angela, in which the two main female characters fall in love and end up living together (if you've ever read Shirley you'll know why I think Charlotte might write a book like this). Sex is not mentioned, but even so, it causes a scandal. After that, all Charlotte's books instantly become bestsellers, among men as well as women. Other authors become slightly more daring in relation to sexual matters, this, along with the feminist messages in Charlotte's books, help to make the 1890s in particular rather more liberal than in OTL. Women get the vote in Britain in 1892, and women's clothing of the 1890s and 1900s is much more comfortable, and slightly more daring, than in OTL (trousers become acceptable).

Emily writes Isolation, a very strange and unsettling psychological horror story. She also writes the Gozre books, four individual books set in the same invented world. They are rather brutal, disturbing and passionate for 19th Century readers. These immensely popular books launch an immediate fashion for weird horror and fantasy books. One result is that in this timeline there is no "genre snobbery", well written books of any genre can be considered to be "literature".
 
This is a continution of the Bronte POD.

In 1913, two years after the start of the Great War, Cressida Noth published Gabrielle in Paris, the first in a new genre - labyrinths. Labyrinths are novels divided into numbered paragraphs. The reader decides what actions the hero or heroine take, turning to different paragraphs depending on their decisions. Thus there are many paths through the book. Labyrinths became a worldwide craze for about a decade, settling down to become just another minor genre in most nations but becoming and remaining the major genre in Britain and the White Commonwealth. Although Gabrielle in Paris was a romance labyrinths do of course exist for every type of story one can imagine. The most popular labyrinths are undoubtedly the Jeremy Kelly's complex farces. Written from the 1960s to the 1990s, they were usually set on university campuses.

The 1960s to the 1990s were also known for the popularity of the lesbian girl's boarding school romance serials. These were published as ongoing stories over dozens of volumes, with each volume covering one school term (usually a summer holiday edition was also published in which the main characters travelled to some exotic location). These serials had hosts of ever-changing characters and plots and addicted their fans who couldn't wait for the next volume. Among the most popular authors was Edwina Floyd Singer, whose Loch Luichart was distinguished by its sharp satire, and Hortense, the French author whose St. Martin serial was widely translated, at least in the more liberal countries of the world.
 
Interesting, but I am not sure that a Bronte, or anyone else, can change social mores by writing just one novel.

As I posted previously, it is very difficult to disdinguish cause and effect in art.
 
I think it's plausible that if Dickens had never written Oliver Twist attitudes to the poor might have been harsher that they were in OTL. In fact I'm certain that in a world without Oliver Twist Tony Blair's government would now be planning to bring back the workhouse.

What about a world with no Uncle Tom's Cabin? No Lady Chatterley's Lover? No The Well of Loneliness? No Tom Brown's Schooldays?
 
After all, what does change social mores? The spread of ideas.

How do ideas spread? People spread them.

Which people? Influential people.

Who, in the pre television era, is influential people? Writers.

Non-fiction may have a greater effect on the people who read it, but I think more people will have read Oliver Twist than The Conditions of the Working Classes in England.
 

Tielhard

Banned
"Which people? Influential people."

Maybe, this is a view of history very strongly influenced by Carlyle.

Perhaps to inject a little Marxism into the debate people only become influential when the ideas they espouse resonate with the cultural expectations of the general population?
 

Tielhard

Banned
"What about a world with

no Uncle Tom's Cabin?" ACW proceeds on schedule
"No Lady Chatterley's Lover?" This is a serious loss to history it means that I in the ATL do not get laid by a beautiful Swedish girl on an INTERAIL holiday in the early 1980s (long story)
"No The Well of Loneliness?" It bombed, it was only of interest to women who were already of a lesbian inclination (and of a class that could afford books).
"No Tom Brown's Schooldays?" No Flashman, I can live with that, the English public schools still embrace muscular Christianity and sportsmanship. Arnold is credited with changing the system not Tom Hughes.
 
You monster! That would mean no FLASHMAN!!! Aigh!

Well, perhaps George McDonald Fraser could write about Billy Bunter's experiences in the Second World War instead.

no Uncle Tom's Cabin?" ACW proceeds on schedule

From Wikipedia:

"Many writers have credited this novel with inflaming the passions of residents of the northern half of the United States to work towards the abolition of slavery, though the novel's historical influence has been disputed. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe after the beginning of the American Civil War, he reportedly said to her, "So you're the little lady whose book started this great war." In addition, some have claimed that the book so affected British readers that it kept Britain from joining the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy."

I'm sure I know very little about the causes of the ACW, but from what I have read I got the impression that Uncle Tom's Cabin was very influential. It was the second bestselling book of the 19th Century (after the Bible). And at least three million people saw stage plays or shows based on the book.

"No The Well of Loneliness?" It bombed, it was only of interest to women who were already of a lesbian inclination (and of a class that could afford books).

I didn't mean that straight people read the book and became lesbians. What I meant was, that if you have lesbian inclinations, it must make a big difference to you, and to your attitude towards your inclinations, if you are living in a world in which you know that other lesbians exist and in which you can read novels written about them.

"No Tom Brown's Schooldays?" No Flashman, I can live with that, the English public schools still embrace muscular Christianity and sportsmanship. Arnold is credited with changing the system not Tom Hughes.

Well, I had thought that Tom Brown's Schooldays had had some effect in popularising Arnold's ideas. But in any case, Tom Brown's Schooldays started a trend in Britain for boarding school fiction that lasted into the 1950s.

"No Lady Chatterley's Lover?" This is a serious loss to history it means that I in the ATL do not get laid by a beautiful Swedish girl on an INTERAIL holiday in the early 1980s (long story)

Sounds like it might be an interesting story though.

I think the Sherlock Holmes stories probably had an effect on history too. Without Holmes I don't think the crime novel would exist in its current form. I think popular crime novels must have encouraged many people to attempt to become police detectives. The reason I think that is that when I was studying psychology at university I was amazed by the number of people who wanted to study psychology so they could become forensic psychologists. Every one of them I spoke to mentioned Cracker as their inspiration, Cracker being a TV show about a forensic psychologist that had been very popular a few years previously. People are like sheep, you know. So I bet the calibre of police detectives in OTL has been improved as a result of the popularity of crime novels. The downside is that TV schedules in the UK in OTL are awash with rubbishy crime dramas.
 
Goethe, Kipling and Hemingway all had strong impacts--largely negative for the the last two, esp. Papa who defined masculinity for a generation of American men that were very insecure about it.

In a different vein Mary Shelly, Jules Verne and HG Wells stimulated the public imagination.

Suprised no one has mentioned music. What would the Jazz Age had been without Jazz?

Tom
 

Thande

Donor
The Lord of the Rings had an incalculable influence on subsequent fantasy (and related genre) works - if Tolkien stops a bullet on the Western front, imagine the changes... (particularly if CS Lewis dies beside him).
 
Without Sherlock Holmes, the detective novel would have still come about. Poe created the first published detective, C. Auguste Dupin. It just would have taken longer the catch on. One of Agatha Christie's characters would have had the place of honor that Holmes now occupies.

Some say Shakespeare just put his name on the plays, but that he didn't write them. It his is true, then someone else would have been the credited writer.
 
Thank you for restoring my faith in art as a historically significant endeavour. :)

Jazz is another good one, because it becomes tied up with a politics and a lifestyle, not to mention literary and visual art movements.

I'm going to harp on about the Romantics a bit more eventually. (But I need to do some more reading because I seem to have forgotten everything I ever knew about them.)
 
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