What is Thomas Mann's central idea about art and life?
The central conundrum, as I perceive it, revolves around the perpetual, indeed I might say tragic, entanglement of art and life. It is a curious thing, but the artist, the practitioner of the aesthetic realm, is often deeply rooted in, even drawn to, the very bourgeois order from which he or she ostensibly seeks to depart. This creates a profound dialectic: the life of the artist is frequently characterized by a morbid fascination with sickness, with death – 'Death in Venice' being a stark illustration of this – and with the Dionysian, the chaotic, which stands in stark opposition to the Apollonian, the ordered, the stable existence that provides the very soil for their creative impulse. My work often attempts to navigate this perilous, yet artistically fertile, territory.
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