Neo-Gothic Period Art

I am making a reference to Neo-Gothic Period art in the CEU I am giving for ASID CA Peninsula on Thursday. Since this is not a well known or understood movement I wanted to have some information about it available for the attendees.

Stephanie Evans - All Locked Up

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/gothic/arthistory_gothicart.html

Neo-Gothic Art

Art movement that started in the early 1980s as part of the punk movement and later associated with Fantasy Art.

During the late 1990s it became recognized as a new artistic style. The term “Neo-Gothic Art” was coined by Charles Alexander Moffat, who wrote “The Neo-Gothic Art Manifesto“. Moffat remains one of the driving forces behind the style as an artistic movement.

Other artists include: Marilyn Manson, Victoria Van Dyke, Caroline Folkenroth, Stefanie Lynn Evans, Judith Weratschnig, Eliza Bathory, Floria Sigismondi, and Jeff Lowe.

The style is very popular in Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Movement emphasizes the bizarre, obscene, sexual, blasphemous, mysterious, horrific and gender-confusion/androgyny.

The thing that I have always found surprising is the choice of Neo_Gothic as the description of the movement because the Neo-Goths, or Goths as they prefer to be called, are more inclined to revere the darker aspects of the human condition, and they seek out the night, shadows and darkness.

This is the polar opposite of the Gothic Period which revered light and the higher aspirations of humanity. Gothic cathedrals are not dark places, the architecture was developed in response for the desire to have many large windows to let light in.

I believe the attraction of the Gothic lifestyle for young people is the romance of sexual allegories that so many of the myths of Western Europe are built upon. The darkness of the mood and characterization of the movement, I believe, is an artifact of the entertainment industries tendency to revise history in pursuit of a compelling story line.