| Title | Creator | Date | Era | City |
Country |
Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Samovar | Painter: Emil Carlsen | 1920c. | 1900s |
The world is full of textural richness worth looking at. |
The richness of light and the objects it caresses. This is a paean to the richness of visual experience, but with the simplest of materials -- just a light source and two kinds of simple unadorned objects. |
|||
| Owl and the Sparrow | Director: Stephane Gauger | 2007 | 1991-2010 | Saigon | Vietnam |
A child shows sweetness and strength and determination. |
Searching for family, for soulmates. |
|
| Johnson Wax Building | Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright | 1939 | 1900 - 1950 | Racine | United States |
Day to day life can be exalted and pleasurable. |
To Work should be a condition of grandeur and joy. |
|
| Etudes | Choreographer: Harold Lander | 1948 | Pre-1950 Ballet/Dance | New York | United States |
Thrilling pleasure at beautiful movement and great success at developing the best within you. |
Hard work results in great achievement in life -- and that results in beauty and excitement in life. |
|
| Dangerous Beauty | Director: Marshall Herskovitz | 1998 | United States |
The world is a horrible split of conventional marital morality vs. honest but promiscuous morality. The way to live requires one sacrifice one's body for one's soul. |
|
|||
| Diana | Sculptor: Auguste Saint-Gaudens | 1892 | 1900s | New York | United States |
Serenity in action. But not a strong world view in any case, quite placid. |
||
| Spider Web Narcissi Table Lamp | Designer: Louis Comfort Tiffany | circa 1902 | 1900-1950 | United States |
Richness of form, sumptuous shapes. |
|||
| Burn Notice | Creator: Matt Nix | 2007 | Miami | United States |
Anything can be done if you are smart and motivated enough. |
|||
| Die Hard | Director: John McTiernan | 1988 July 15 | United States |
The way to beat evil is to give no quarter, no compromise. Life is hard, but fighting for the right is rewarded. |
Giving up in life is not an option. |
|||
| Mad Men | Creator: Matthew Weiner | 2007 | Los Angeles | United States |
Men must sell their souls in order to live, and they are chauvinist pigs to boot. And women are sluts. Dark. |
|||
| Romeo + Juliet | Director: Baz Luhrmann | 1996 | 1991-2010 | United States |
Tragedy is central to life. |
Romantic Love is doomed and we don't control our own lives. |
||
| Staircase Group (aka Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale) | Painter: Charles Wilson Peale | 1795 | Philadelphia | United States |
Perceiving accurately is important and playing with the artistic medium is fun. |
|||
| Blue Phoenix | Painter: Koyo Omura | 1921 | 1900s | Chicago | United States |
A pleasing and lush, possibly claustrophobic, world. |
||
| Day at the Beach | Painter: J.C. Leyendecker | 1932 | 1900s | United States |
Fun and cuteness. |
|||
| Real Adventure, The | Author: Henry Kitchell Webster | 1915 | United States |
Life is wonderful as long as you realize that life has to be earned the hard way. |
Creating your self is the only way to live. |
|||
| Atlas Shrugged | Author: Ayn Rand | 1957 | 1951 - 2000 | New York | United States |
Life can be good; Men are competent to live happily; The world can be a shining, happy place to exist, if one is free. But novel also presents a dark, dystopian world to help make real that positive view. |
The crucial value of the human mind. |
|
| Blue Steps of Naumkeag | Landscape Designer: Fletcher Steele | 1937-39 | 1900 - 1950 | Stockbridge, MA | United States |
elegance and grace |
The man-made enhances nature -- it is what makes nature beautiful |
|
| Wall Street | Director: Oliver Stone | 1987 | 1971-1990 | United States |
There are bad people in power who use ordinary people as pawns in their endless pursuit of money. Those who are not ruthless are sheep to be slaughtered by the rich and powerful. Greed is bad. |
Financiers are amoral money-grubbing backstabbers, i.e., desire for money corrupts |
||
| Camelot | Composer: Lerner and Loewe | 1960 | 1951-2000 | New York | United States |
One must attempt to live by values, even though virtue is powerless and hopeless. |
Camelot: a medieval place of goodness and justice, and its inevitable failure. |
|
| Boulevard of Broken Dreams | Composer: Warren and Dubin | 1933-34 | 1900s | United States |
Weariness & Sadness |
Life is loss of dreams and sadness |
||
| King in Khaki, A | Author: Henry Kitchell Webster | 1909 | 1900 - 1950 | United States |
Honesty is a noble and practical way of life. |
Business acumen produces both material wealth and moral right. The success of the entrepreneur in this story, along with his relation to all his staff and secondary and tertiary folks on the island who work for him -- makes him into a "king" based on important human relations and the rightness of his decisions that result in a successful business enterprise. A subsidiary theme might be termed the power of morality over physical power or economic "power". |
||
| Attila (live performance) | Composer: Giuseppe Verdi | 2010 03 03 | 1851-1900 | New York | United States |
Life is a mix of strength, heroism, romantic passion. The work is a long complex opera, so it has many other lyrical emotions as part of it, but this covers the basic sense of life. |
Loving a heroic woman leads to death |
|
| East of Eden | Author: John Steinbeck | 1952 | 1951 - 2000 | United States |
Life is filled with great and important choices. |
The battle between good and evil, guilt and innocence. Takes the position that we are influenced by many things, but ultimately we have free will. |
||
| Wall-E | Director: Andrew Stanton | 2008 | 1991-2010 | Hollywood | United States |
The world is garbage, and more garbage and humans have destroyed the earth, because of their wanton consumerism. |
Mankind is a blight on the universe, and only cute robots (as opposed to evil robots) can save the earth from human degradation. |
|
| Comedia | Painter: Thomas Wilmer Dewing | 1892-4c | 1800s | Philadelphia | United States |
Life is sumptuous and beautiful and alive. |
Feminine vivacity and gaiety |
