The Prophetic Powers of Art

It seems that one can identify numerous examples where artists, through their creations, seemed to predict future events. Almost as though these people are equipped with advanced knowledge of what is to come. What is it that allows them to see what so many others cannot?

Artists, to be good artists, must posses a very finely tuned sense of the present since they draw their inspirations from what is around them. Because of this they are able to more easily make cause and effect connections between unrelated happenings in the world. They are more likley to notice what events and traits in people are going to not work out so well.

If we look at music and literature we see these examples. Mary Shelley wrote of Frankenstein, the scientist who in his quest for knowledge creates an monster that threatens the world. About a century later scientists in the United States would create the atomic bomb.

The middle symphonies of Gustav Mahler seem to predict two events. The tragic nature of his sixth seems to allude to three disasters in his own life: his firing from the Vienna Opera due to his Jewish ethnicty, the death of his eldest daughter, and finally his own death to heart disease. On a broader scale these symphonies foreshadow the violence of the coming 21st century.