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Notes -
Thanks, AAQC’d.
For substance to the comment, I find that hoi polloi can appreciate, say, Fra Angelico or other late medieval artists much more easily than Picasso, perhaps about as well as Monet or Van Gogh. The point at which art went off the rails seems to be earlier than you’re pointing to.
I have to respectfully disagree with the specific examples you chose - as someone who has worked in public facing art institutions and museums interacting with throngs of tourists and casual museum-goers, Picasso is an absolute hit with the hoi polloi and by far one of the most common name drops for people who aren't aficionados or professionally involved in the art world.
Fra Angelico on the other hand blends into almost every single other "old" painting in the general publics mind, which they can as a whole barely distinguish or situate aside from famous pop culture classics like the Mona Lisa. I tentatively agree that if you were to drill them with questions about which artist has more beautiful formal output or better technical mastery, they might begrudgingly agree to Fra Angelico - but they like Picasso because they think it has a specific coolness, edge, and doesn't leave them feeling confused and uneducated as to the subject matter (the average lowbrow museum visitor couldn't even tell you what an Annunciation Scene is, it all just melts into "old Christian art"). Picasso has also been subject to a vast marketing campaign and has become a pop icon in his own right - and the masses love a celebrity, always.
Now, if we would ask the hoi polloi to choose between any kind of Old Master painting and some overly discursive conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth or actionist performance piece by Herman Nitsch, I definitely agree they would go for the former - and it IS true that modernist art has become a hermetic, jargon-and-discourse-heavy scene that often uses very nebulous and downright non-artistic criteria to evaluate contemporary art. What I'm disagreeing with specifically is that modern art is inherently bad due to elitism and that the central focus of Western art pre-modernism was its craftsmanship.
Also, calling avant-garde artists emasculated when it was quite literally their absolute time in the sun is so pitiful - it was pretty much the apex of the Artist as a public influence on society, a historically unparalleled prestige position that was gradually lost in the post-war Era.
Also, Monet and Van Gogh are some of the biggest crowd-pleasers out there and it's not even close.
Yes, people like impressionism.
My pick of Fra Angelico was more 'random talented old painter' than anything specific to him. I think if shown a cubist painting and a random piece of 15th century religious art, most people would pick the religious art- although I'll agree that people certainly like the cachet of namedropping Picasso. People like well done representation; that's the core definition of 'art'.
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Picasso has High favorability, rather higher than Monet.
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