Check out this article on Plugged In’s website. The old question is again raised: to what extent does art reflect culture and to what extent does art shape culture?

We are a society of romantics, looking for the next emotional high or low. I was in a band in high school, and I swear that our singer/songwriter would enter a relationship half hoping that it wouldn’t work out so that he could write a heartfelt breakup song. If we’re not constantly emotional, we’re somehow less human.

Yet we appropriate others’ artistic productions to express our own feelings. We make montages of our favorite TV couples, set them to our favorite songs, and post them on Youtube. We copy neat photos and literary quotes to our facebook pages to convey our own emotions. We feel like we are contributing to culture and understanding, but we’re just homines incurvati.