Hm, I believe there might really be a different "mentality", as you call it, in Europe.
I can't put it down into words ... It's like ... No, I ran out of words, literally.
I think I need to think several days over this to "grow" words for what I mean. Maybe someone else is better in that than me.
It's like the Bauhaus philosophy of building buildings. In fact, it conquered EVERYTHING.
I'm often going around here in Cologne, and I often notive the Art Nuveau - here called "Jugendstil" - type of architecture.
These buildings are exceptionally rich - sometimes - in their embellishments.
It's as if people have added some embellishments to the outer walls to let the people actually see some sort of beauty in the houses they live in - and that any time they approach them (their houses).
The front side of buildings just become
art.
Just as an example (found via google) .
http://www.schwarzaufweiss.de/belgien/jugendstil.htm
Or this:
http://www.designladen.com/metz/source/metz-jugendstil-4267.html
Now, Bauhaus stripped everything of these [embellishments].
Look here, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
Everything is driven by Rationality, Efficiency, there is nothing there anymore to please the people like art normally does.
The form language has been reduced to edges and to wedges; to clear, straight lines without any interuption; to an most possible efficiencvy (so it appears to me) in terms of using building stuff.
This has never changed. There are no more embellishments to please the eye anymore. Because people have learned that they are just one factor: Cost(s).
So, Art is pushed out, because art is reduced to one factor: To "how much costs it ?".
Art is therefore no more art, because it has been economized, it has been commercialized. Art pour l'art is no more possible because everyone asks for costs.
So, the loss of embellishments of hpueses is to me a quite symbolic sign of how humans began to treat art in general. There is no more "public art", because 1. art is meant to be for an elite only (at least here), and 2. (therefore) it is "banned" into museums and into very few public statues etc. . Almost all public art I see here is several decades old, with a few exceptions, of course.
Furthermore, because Art is reduced to the cost factor, Art isn't seen anymore as a way to express oneself (artistically), and art isn't seen anymore as a way to please people publicly.
Let's take making vases, for example. People will only ask for the "cost factor". The clay ccosts money, the burning costs money, not to speak of finding or making an oven for that. It just costs.
This emphasis on the "cost factor" makes people hesitate from performing art themselves.
And therefore this emphasis on the "cost factor" is an effective too from holding people away from doing something artistically, from doing something that "pleases the eyes", so to say.
Making and manufacturing art has become almost a profession of a selected and/or gifted few. No more of the masses.
This whole process reminds me of the book "Momo" by Michael Ende.
In this book, it's time - and time becomes money.
Which leads the people into hestitating to use "time" as a "resource".
In the book, Time is also economized, commercialized. People are effectively stripped of their greatest gift: Of Time !
Same goes for Art now, and of Games.
Because these factors are imho an
essential part of human living - and breaking them down and reducing that all into "costs", nothing else, nothing more, is like true poison to Humanity - like what the Men in Grey do to time.