Hedonism: A Little 500-inspired movement?

Little 500 is upon us, and unlike last year, Bacchus and the other deities of hedonism have given us the spirit of revival and celebration.

It seems as though the year has gone by with the perfectly exorbitant amount of work to snap us into a week of communal excess. As such, scholars have deemed massive Tuesday night ragers the natural byproduct of a semester of hard work at IU. We have perfected the mantra “Work hard, play hard” and found a systemic balance between our beer-chugging desires and our gender studies obligations.

So whom do we owe for teaching us the philosophy of temporary excess? While rational egoists like prolific writer Ayn Rand would have us understand that serving the interest of the self via pleasure is a natural instinct that has to fight against collective ideals, those I-Core kids slaving to finish up their projects this week prove that pure self-interest is not entirely on the minds of IU students.

Little 500 thus owes its inherent excessive nature to the Decadence Movement.

Regarded as the transition between Romanticism and Modernism, this period highlighted artifice over the realistic or emotionally stirring, and not ironically, it didn’t last that long.

Sprouting up in France in the late 19th century, poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud emphasized fleeting moments over what they saw as “banal progress” because, generally, they didn’t see the big, long-term picture.

The movement spread from the literary world to the visual world when Rococo artists painted depictions of lushly dressed partygoers enjoying recreation. This is most evident in Fragonard’s painting “The Swing,” which depicts an elaborately dressed woman kicking her shoes off to a man beneath her while pumping upward in a highly angled swing.

The movement also spread its way to America and Britain, influencing writers and social critics Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde.

Unfortunately, like Little 500, Decadence couldn’t last and was soon taken over as the predominant artistic expression by Symbolism. It was then completely removed from the picture by Realism. Still, influence of the period remains through club culture, pop art, disco and our keen attention to pop culture topics. It sprouts up here and there in changing forms, from it-girl worship to pointless comedy – and, ultimately, a week-long party that actually has very little to do with a bike race.

Once Little 500 is over, we will return to our eight- to 10-page papers, begrudging our respective workloads but also understanding that we’re doing something useful. But for the time being, give yourself a pat on the back, act completely useless and realize how important temporary excess might actually be.