Art at the edge of emotion: Living in a state of anxiety
Since the mid‑1990s we live in what has been variously called an “age of anxiety”, a “risk society” and a “culture of fear”. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the phrase “liquid fear” to suggest the pervading and pervasive sense of insecurity, uncertainty and profound anxiety that has now—in Bauman’s words— “settled inside, saturating our daily routines; it hardly needs further stimuli from outside, since the actions it prompts day in, day out supply all the motivation and all the energy it needs to reproduce itself.” Such condition is maintained through a privatisation of public fears and a projection of private ones into the public sphere by rendering them a blueprint of daily interaction.
