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To what extent is this itself a modern phenomenon? Plenty of historical artists were obsessed with natural, including human, forms (e.g. da Vinci, Michelangelo, Durer). I could believe that the obsession with man made beauty is a "preversion" of the modern artistic class, but I don't see a reason why it should be so, or even why the members of the academy should have been replaced by those who don't care about natural beauty in the first place.
It's a highly modern phenomenon, and it was driven by many things - the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction, for example, since withdrawing from realism was a way to distinguish themselves and find something photography couldn't do. Of course, they didn't have to make the new style so ugly - Islamic art has long tackled non-representational visual style with incredible results which I think most of the public would enjoy, which leads me to my second point:
Artists previously conceptualised themselves as inevitably having to interact with the commercial world - many modern design schools were an attempt to distance themselves from this, to bring taste into the halls of academia, and this also meant they removed all sanity-checks on their vision of artistry. This is how you get things like Eisenman depriving his client of a master bedroom where the couple could sleep together, and depriving them of a staircase with a proper railing, and initially attempting to deprive them of bathrooms in-house. Mies van der Rohe made a building with only three positions for the blinds inside of them; allowing people to only open them fully, halfway, or have them completely closed, because the demands of life should not impose upon their artistic vision. In Tom Wolfe's book From Bauhaus to Our House, a sneering quote can be found from the director of the Museum of Modern Art "We are asked to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers!"
In many European art compounds it was not uncommon to announce something akin to "We have just removed the divinity of art and architecture from the hands of the official art establishment [the Academy, the National Institute, the Künstlergenossenschaft, whatever], and it now resides with us, inside our compound. We no longer depend on the patronage of the nobility, the merchant class, the state, or any other outside parties for our divine eminence. Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in art’s divine glow must come here, inside our compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations, special orders, or loud talk from the client permitted. We know best. We have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future of architecture."
In contrast much art back then was "commercial" art understood to be made primarily for the benefit of wealthy patrons, and the first image that comes to mind whenever I think of a tremendous artist is Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, contorted in an uncomfortable position, paint dripping down onto his face, reading scripture intently so he could draw inspiration from the words of the Bible itself, and yet feeling so inadequate about his ability to rise to the task he literally believed it would destroy his reputation, as detailed in his poem about the painting of the chapel. He did not consider himself a painter and only acquiesced to the pope's pressure for him to take on the commission. But he singlehandedly made one of the most beloved pieces of Western art in existence.
Now consider this absolute hubris from Jan Tschichold's book The New Typography: "More than all previous art, the art of today demands creative will and strength. Its aim is utmost clarity and purity. ... Is it then surprising that its representations at first baffle the unsophisticated viewer, who is used to something completely different, or even actually repel him? Lazy and hostile people are still trying to make it appear contemptible in the eyes of others. and describe it as nonsense. These are the same people from whose physical attacks Manet's "Olympia" had to be protected by the police, a picture that is today one of the most precious treasures of the Louvre. Their prattling is too empty and unimportant to be taken seriously."
Yes, artists being indulgent has always existed, and there's some continuity between the attitudes of artists then and today, but in general the difference in humility is incredible. It's been a trend of modern artists and designers to view themselves as beholden to nothing, with the public being seen as an irrelevant triviality. And that would also be my response to @Primaprimaprima above - dictatorships of taste have never sat right with me, and the purpose of public art is for, well, the public. For artists not to consider the effects of their work on the intended stakeholders is basically a dereliction of their intended function, IMO. The complete separation of art from commerciality or the actual people it's being made for, where they will fail to consider the public's preferences and instead opt for narcissistic works of self-edification, is one of the very many defects of modern artistic thought.
Your first point is good and sounds reasonable.
Your second point is not clear to me. What is it that caused artists in the modern era to rebel against the tastes of their patrons? Why is it that these rebellious artists, rather than toiling in obscurity, actually became commercial successes with ample patronage?
It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed. This is kind of kicking the can down the road, because we can ask why the taste of patrons changed in the first place - but I'm comfortable saying that peoples' tastes change over time for some exogenous reasons, and sometimes they change for the worse.
Two possibilities come to mind for a shift in power towards artists:
Artistic defectors have been shunned for hundreds of years. Off the top of my head, the Vienna Secession and the Exhibit of Rejects both consisted of artists with heterodox styles that couldn't find a place in the academy and had to strike out on their own.
Those are 1897 and 1863. Going purely by the links provided, the Vienna case is angry modernists splitting off from what they considered to be a defunct institution; the Paris case was similar and they got a special exhibit put on for them by the emperor.
Especially in Vienna, this doesn’t look like the academy shunning defectors so much as defectors coordinating to shun the traditional academy. Being less tolerant, they won and took over.
The emperor himself didn't like any of their works and only acquiesced to let them be exhibited during the Paris Salon over the objections of the Salon's jury (rather different from putting on a special exhibit for them) due to the weight of public opinion.
It's a case of defectors being told they have no place in the academy, and leaving to start their own thing. Same as it ever was.
You are avoiding the question of why this is no longer an option. How much harder can defectors be shunned than when they had to leave the mainstream artistic edifice entirely to follow their vision?
I might be being influenced by hindsight here, but this seems like thinking that e.g. the anti-Covid-lockdown protests and the anti white-on-black police brutality protests were the same, just because the outward forms look similar. The genuinely disapproved-of Covid protests were punished with huge (10,000gbp in the UK) fines while the BLM protests had open sympathisers in high positions.
My model is that if your movement is genuinely shunned, it disappears. People who leave to start their own thing and follow their vision are getting backing from somewhere. Or to put it another way, if you see a little guy speaking truth to power, he's already on the way up; if he weren't, he'd be silent. You know someone's a real defector because people laugh at them, they can't get commissions, and anyone who tries to publish them follows the same path.
It disappears if everyone shuns it, sometimes. Sometimes you become Vincent van Gough, shunned during your life and a darling afterwards. If you're only shunned by the academy, though, you can still get ahead by striking out for yourself - most people are not as doctrinaire as old academic artists, and wealthy patrons are free to fund the things they like even if the professors tut-tut at them.
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