deviate:
Just in case you’ve never stumbled across it, deviantart is currently roaring toward its fifth birthday, having collected some 10-million young creatives along the way (the Birmingham
ones look like this in the flesh). ‘Romanticism not dead – shock!’ – although often looking a bit tired. But, of course, to these young creatives capital-R Romanticism feels fresh. They’ve never seen Samuel Palmer, the Pre-Raphaelites or Burne-Jones. They’ve never read Ruskin, George MacDonald, Mary Shelley or the Romantic poets. Never heard Fingal’s Cave or Elgar. But the broad legacy of the Romantics, crushed by Modernism and Abstract Expressionism, filtered down into that trusty old gutter called ‘the English underground’ and re-emerged as the vigourous lowbrow youth culture that these young creatives now inhabit. It’s The Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, gothic heavy-metal, vampire epics, manga comics, Bryce/Poser art, superflat, fantasy RPG game-worlds, and so on.
