Fantastic Metropolis

This new artistic Utopia grew at the site where the scientific Utopia began to lose its initiative and to close the spiritual horizons of Man. The artistic Utopia acquired its direct embodiment in the founding of a colony called “New Athens.” The colony originated as the result of complex and voluminous plans in the field of social engineering, which served as the groundwork for reliably-defined optimal measures for the size of this community, its population composition, model of social order, as well as long term goals.

Still, regardless of this scientific guarantee, the founding of New Athens was awaited with a certain amount of skepticism for two reasons. In certain sense, the thus-conceived colony represented a challenge to the policy of the Overlords, who had never hindered the artistic ambitions of the people but nor did they encourage them. However, just as in many preceding cases, the newcomers from space did not react at all, remaining completely indifferent to all the activities of the Earth people which did not imperil the general welfare.

The second reason which partially generated suspicion in terms of the tenability of New Athens was founded on experience from earlier periods. “Yet even in the past, long before any real knowledge of social dynamics had existed, there had been many communities devoted to special religious or philosophical ends. It was true that their mortality rate had been high, but some had survived.”

The ideal which was to have been embodied in New Athens was almost without precedent in the past. The basic concept of the founders of this utopian community was “to build up an independent, stable cultural group with its own artistic traditions.” The pre-condition for these traditions consisted of providing a high concentration of world artists (“...nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests”), who should achieve the optimum of creative utilization of idleness. “Everybody on this island,” says one of the managers of New Athens, “has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do ‘something,’ however small it may be, better than anyone else.”

It is obvious that the value of this work simultaneously defines the value of the artistic Utopia itself. The creative endeavours of the residents of New Athens were, first of all, concentrated on discovering original forms of expression, in the traditional as well as in the new artistic areas. It is, however, symptomatic that this aspiration toward originality, as an affirmation of creativity, was mostly reduced to a number of experiments reasonably described on one occasion as being “aggressively modernistic.” As the number of experimental possibilities in the context of known artistic domains of expression was finite, there were rapid premonitions as to the final horizons of all fields of art.

Indeed, this fact did not threaten the creative potentials of the inhabitants of New Athens as generations were needed to finalize the already-initiated experiments. Still, the awareness of the existence of the final borderlines of art had a significant impact on the discreet occurrence of doubt as to the general value of this form of Man’s spiritual expression or rather in its importance outside the narrowly local coordinates of Earth—coordinates which now had their incomparably broader correlate in the cosmic perspective of the development of mankind, a constant reminder of this being the presence of the Overlords.

In this situation, it was highly interesting but in a certain sense irrelevant to hear the opinion of the newcomers from space on the general value of art and, in the final analysis, on the usefulness of the Utopia called New Athens. An opportunity for this confirmation was shown during the visit of one of the Overlords—a visit which was supposedly intended to analyze the way of life and the goals of the colony but whose real motives were of a completely different nature. “There were some on the island who welcomed this visit as a chance of settling one of the minor problems of Overlord psychology—their attitude toward art. Did they regard it as a childish aberration of the human race?” (underlined by Z. Ž.)

The viewpoint of the newcomers from space concerning the value of the artistic expression of the Earth people was indeed difficult to define due to their reluctance to put forward any opinions which could even remotely suggest the final ends of their “altruistic” engagement with mankind. Still, there were two occasions on which somewhat more could be gleaned about this viewpoint.

In the first case, the conclusion was drawn indirectly, on the basis of the reaction of an Overlord when viewing a theatre performance. He actually reacted adequately and timely, but a certain doubt still remained. “He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite.”