Counterculture
Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points
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What is Counterculture and what is the Counterculture Movement of the 1960s?
Counterculture is a phenomenon that can occur in any era, although when this term is used, it usually refers to a particular movement that was the protagonist of the sixties in the twentieth century.
As a phenomenon in general, counterculture is the set of ideas, values, attitudes, and behaviors that go against the culture already established in society. It is a tendency or movement, or even the attitude of a small group of people, that manifests nonconformity against the established order.
Counterculture in general can have two meanings: it can seek to change the established culture, which paradoxically would then become the leading culture to be criticized and attacked; or it can seek to make its nonconformity clear, to the point of remaining on the margin without seeking to prevail, and romantically maintain itself as a counterculture.
The term “Counterculture” was first used and developed by Theodore Roszak in 1968 in his book The Birth of a Counterculture. This book is about the growing nonconformism of the youth of the big cities with respect to traditional values and the emergence of new convictions about the order of society, peace, individual liberties, the questioning of traditional forms of authority, individual rights, civil rights (equality before the law for all ethnic groups and minorities), sexuality, freedom, feminism, and liberation of conscience.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, society was moved by the advance of a counterculture that dreamed of a better, more egalitarian world where peace and love would reign.
This movement began in the United States and the United Kingdom and then spread throughout the Western world. And it was a trend that moved society at times of great social tension due to the struggle for civil rights, the decision of the U.S. government to intervene in Vietnam, sending some of the youth to die, and the arms race that presaged a nuclear war (such as the 1962 Missile Crisis, involving the U.S., Cuba, and the Soviet Union).
Some of the most representative manifestations of the Counterculture of those years were the hippies, the sexual revolution, Black Power, the expansion of consciousness stimulated by drugs such as LSD, psychedelia, admiration for Eastern cultures, demonstrations against the atomic bomb, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, community life as the search for an alternative way of living, producing, and consuming, “love and peace,” the Woodstock recital, the peace movement, and the protest song.
For young people, the system imposed on them had failed, so they were not going to fight a war that they did not even feel was their own. It was the ideal moment to attempt to change everything. It was the moment to make love and not war. And although love and peace did not reign forever and they could not change the world, the protagonists of the movement would always have romantic memories of having tried to do so.
Image: Woodstock (1969), the concert attended by 400,000 people, is not only the most important in history but also a symbol of Counterculture.
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