We have the argument that the city can shape identity. Let's demonstrate this with some examples. We'll look at the artistic consciousness and try to show how it was affected the experience of the city.

The Pre-Raphaelites

These were a bunch of 19th century British painters who lived in the cities of industrial Britain. Several of them got the money to paint because their families were wealthy industrialists. Some of them made ends meet by selling their paintings to rich industrialists. Most of the art galleries which collected their works were the big city galleries in the big industrail cities such as Manchester and Birmingham. These galleries depended on donations from, you've guessed it, rich industrialists. But these artists seem to have hated the Victorian industrial city. They hated the camera and new techniques of printing and publishing. Their artistic consciousness reacted to the industrial city by painting medieval and rural scenes, by painting hand labour rather mechanised industry, and by painting super-real levels of detail. Take a look at some of their works:

Pretty Baa Lambs

Do you notice how these Pre-Raphaelite paintings all seem to show rural subjects, manual labour, bright colours and matters antithetical to grimy smoky urban industrial England?

The Pre-Raphaelites reacted to the industrial revolution by avoiding it.

Now for an artist who embraced the industrial landscape: L S Lowry.

Lowry lived in Manchester, and trained with an impressionist artist Alfred Valette. Lowry worked as a debt collector, and one day, while walking over a bridge in the Pendlebury district, a man said to him: "Look at that", and Lowry saw. Lowry discovered his artistic muse in the grimy streets, the gritty dirt, the bricks and cobbles of the industrial city. His palette was limited to gloomy, muddy colours, his people are daubs, but he reacts to industrial cities by painting them in all their inglorious ugliness:

Landscape in Wigan 1925. A coal mining town.

Now for another artistic reaction to the city. This time the setting is end-of-the-millenium USA and the artist is a guy called Ron English. He is something of a critic of globalization and corporate America. He paints and he "alters" billboards:

Exxtinct Exxon?

Now these three artists are not really representative, but I hope you can see that in various important ways they reacted to the city. Their artistic consciousness was shaped by the city. They react to the culture of the city and produce new elements of culture.