Table of contentsHistory of nostalgiaPsychological hypothesis/research on the effects of nostalgia on creativityNostalgia, escape and artConclusionEscape is a common theme in the history of art in which artists depict events or activities. which offer an escape from the misfortunes of life. Artists have always found it useful to depict joyful activities in their artwork. The performances created offer momentary amusement as an alternative to the worries that characterize daily activities. The contemporary art world is experiencing a trend in which nostalgia is used to achieve this escapist effect. This wave of nostalgia and escapism may be motivated by respect, interest, or admiration for one's success or importance in the recent past. With each generation, artists try to avoid the style used by the previous one, even if experimentation and iconoclasm were highly valued. Today, artists, designers, and curators are borrowing aesthetic certainties that were popular about fifty years ago and creating art around that inspiration. There are psychological theories that could explain the reasons for this trend and the effect of the underlying concept of nostalgia in creativity. Nonetheless, a new wave in the art world uses nostalgia as a means of escape. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayHistory of NostalgiaThe word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek words “nostos” and “algos” which translate to “return to home” and “nostalgia”. "respectively. Given the context in which the word is used, it would be fair to define it as a desire to return to a home that never existed or ceased to exist. This concept can be a feeling of loss but could just as easily be finding love in one's fantasies. Although the word "nostalgia" has its roots in the Greek language, the term was actually coined by a Swiss student named Johannes Hofer in 1688 while he was writing his medical thesis. The student was trying to find the right words to describe the feeling of pain you experience when you want to go home. He considered using the words nostomania and philopatridomania, but later opted for nostos and algos, from which nostalgia (from a combination of the two words) emerged. After coining the word, Hofer insisted that he could not find the appropriate term to describe the condition he believed to be clinical and criticized members of the medical community for not paying attention to it. By the 18th century, experts and the general European public would adopt the word to refer to the uncomfortable feeling caused by excessive fixation on one's distant homeland. This condition was initially thought to only affect people living at high altitudes, but by the end of the century it expanded to include pathological attachment to distant places. Later, the demographics corresponding to the nostalgia condition were expanded to include fixation on times gone by and distant encounters. The entry of a new word which almost immediately gained popularity in Europe meant that the condition evoked by the new term was that said feeling or perspective of looking at the past had infiltrated society. Over time, nostalgia was commonly associated with groups who had modernity not fully embraced, either in Europe or elsewhere. However, by the end of the 19th century, medical specialists stopped diagnosing this disease in all populations. The reason for theThe "death" of nostalgia as a condition was that other categories of medical diagnoses covered up symptoms previously associated with it. For example, the diagnostic signatures of nostalgia have been absorbed into a disease known as melancholy. Later, melancholy became more associated with characteristics of depression. Nevertheless, after Hofer's 17th-century invention of "nostalgia" was cleared of its medical connections, it moved to other regions. As a result, it has become a term used in multiple ways to denote various forms of relationship with the past. Over the next few years, the word "nostalgia" would become a common term to represent a variety of issues. Some of these problems were associated with empiricism and politics. The word's stern energy comes not from its later history in medicine, but from its later connection to history and political issues. The accusatory power of the word would then be expressed in philosophies linked to psychoanalytic theory, politics and history. Consequently, the meaning of the word "nostalgia" has shifted from a word used in medical discourse to a reference to problems associated with the transition to modernity. In other words, the term began to be used in reference to those who failed to adapt to the modern setting. The most intense rejection of nostalgia occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which the Western world was experiencing a culture industry boom where museums and other heritage industry-related developments and to the development of period films then gained popularity and became fashionable. It is thanks to the popularity of these films that some of the most famous critics of post-modernism emerged. One of these critics was Frederick Jameson. Jameson is relevant because he claimed that historical films created in this era were "nostalgia films", arguing that they simply appealed to the viewer's infantile longings for a past that seemed better than the present. An example from the 1980s is the film Crybaby, where we see the inspiration and plot typically of the 1950s. He also argued that nostalgic films showed the viewer's inability to properly integrate into the present and the past. accepted as a minor part of a long historical progression. Therefore, Jameson's negation of nostalgic films affects the meaning and attitude towards the word "nostalgia". Nevertheless, it was during this period that the term acquired modern meaning. In French, the word is spelled nostalgia, which means the transferred feeling of nostalgia for things that happened in the past. Its use in French literature therefore had to be transferred to English through a loan translation. In other words, translators from French to English borrowed its meaning by using the word in the context surrounding the original word. Therefore, nostalgia is currently used in contemporary terms to refer to the "nostalgic longing" for events of the past. Psychological hypothesis/research on the effects of nostalgia on creativity In 2015, researchers studied whether nostalgia contributes to higher creativity (that is, whether it gives people ideas that are both useful and original ). Researchers hypothesized that nostalgia might be responsible for increasing creativity by opening a person to experience (openness to experience). The team of Van Tilburg, Sedikides, and Wildschut (2015) rationalized their hypothesis by arguing that the said concept increases openness since openness has been shown to have an underlying relationship with inspiration andthe feeling of optimism. Additionally, openness is a potential boost to creativity given that it has been shown to predict “real” creativity as well as self-reported creativity. Essentially, researchers hypothesized that nostalgia stimulates openness, which in turn increases creativity. After hypothesizing that nostalgia stimulates creativity, they followed the principles of the scientific method to prove it, which involved conducting experiments. They ended up conducting experiments, which increased the chances of coming to a more accurate conclusion. After the participants had undergone an introduction to nostalgia, they were then asked to compose a story (lasting 30 minutes) about a cat, a princess and a racing car for experiment 1 or to compose a different story of the same length but this time about a mysterious sound heard on a cold winter evening for experiment 2. The participants' stories were then anonymized and given to independent judges to assess the level of creativity involved. was represented. Each experiment consisted of two sets of groups; one of them was nostalgia-induced while the other was control (without nostalgia). After tabulating the results, it was observed that people without nostalgia (the control group) wrote less creative stories than those with the condition, proving that nostalgia increased creativity. In the third experiment, the team attempted to prove whether nostalgia also increased openness. in order to confirm whether the resulting effect is responsible for the influence of nostalgia on creativity. They used the ERT-based nostalgia induction process used in the other experiments and left an unconditional control group. The researchers then used a 10-item Openness to Experience subscale used to measure personality, a method introduced in 1998 by Benet Martinez and John. Some of the items used in the measure included statements aimed at confirming whether a person feels curious about many things; others focused on whether participants believed they possessed an active imagination. Finally, the team measured creativity using the Ivcevic Scale, whose items included statements about how a participant would handle different situations. Comparing the control group with the nostalgia group, the latter recorded higher points in self-reported creativity, and this result was strongly influenced by openness. Along the same lines, the researchers evaluated the replicability of the results obtained, obtained through the fourth experiment, by attempting to measure creative behavior. Participants were then plunged into a state of nostalgia and were then asked to write creative sentences based on the following words: water, money, eat, sea, pain, pleasure, hot, sun, beautiful and tasty. Sentences from the conditioned control group were then coded and rated by independent judges. The conclusion of these tests was that nostalgia increased creativity and openness (and openness facilitated the nostalgia effect in creativity), which confirmed the research hypothesis. Nostalgia, escapism and art Contemporary artists are creating a new art form in which they combine the aesthetics of the recent past to create attractive works of art. For example, in 2018, Frieze New York had a themed section featuring works by artists discovered by a New York dealer known as Hudson in the 1980s. Several years before Hudson was featured, Gordon Matta- Clark (an artist known for his work on multimedia art in the 1970s) hadreceived the same spotlight. This wave of showcasing relatively forgotten art is not limited to Frieze New York; other art fairs do the same. Artists considered legendary in the field and still alive are receiving a lot of attention lately. People like Carmen Herrera, who has not yet stopped practicing abstract art as she did in the 1950s, have seen their fame renewed through a new admiration for the old ways. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is another artist from the past who received this late acclaim. Additionally, galleries like London's Thomas Dane and Mexico City's Kurimanzutto are planning to revive a legendary gallery called Signals London and stock it with experimental art created between 1964 and 1966. In essence, the art world is doing a notable effort to recognize or revive the art and design of the past. Towards the end of the 20th century, contemporary artists began to reconstruct historical representations through their artwork. This "historical turning point" has ended up producing art that features elements such as obsolete technologies, architectural remains, or other works of art created in the past. This new development had been rejected by academics and critics. For some critics, the tendency to dig into things from the past is an indication of a "pathological escapist fantasy" which suggests that they are incapable of interacting with the present or finding a way to foresee the future and integrate it into their artwork. Due to the volatile nature of nostalgia, an assessment of each case suspects having been influenced by this state. In other words, it is appropriate to evaluate the artistic practice of so-called “nostalgic” artists and to locate and examine their impulse. One of the candidates for this exam is the Danish artist Joachim Koester. His work is characterized by images associated with conceptual art and depictions of architectural ruins, which undoubtedly suggests the possibility that a nostalgic impulse may animate him. Koester began his artistic career in the 90s and was sooner or later considered the initiator of the “historiographic turn”. His art seems to incorporate a measured and overt use of nostalgia as he does not celebrate the past but rather uses it as a reflection or commentary on the present. The way Koester has incorporated the nostalgic impulse into his work requires an expansion to the whole concept of nostalgia, one that allows for a critical, conservative, and progressive reading of the idea. However, the idea of ​​nostalgia has been called bad politics and bad history by modernist and postmodernist philosophers. For example, Marx, Hegel, and Kant collectively argued that nostalgia was an irrational and reactionary impulse since history is a continuous flow in the direction of progress and liberation. On the other hand, postmodernist thinkers like Jameson view it as a parody and a regressive impulse that fabricates the past and interferes with the establishment of a more orderly society. Nevertheless, postmodernity is in itself nostalgic since it is during this period that most of the return to history took place, notably through the creation of the heritage industry and the fetishization of lifestyles. of the past. Therefore, denigrating nostalgia has been seen as ironic. Koester's art challenges the negativity associated with nostalgia by showing the critical and progressive use of the concept. The relationship between nostalgia and escapism is based on the meaning of the two words. Escapism is defined as a way of escaping reality, primarily through means that bring joy. On the other hand, nostalgia is.