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I'm not gonna engage with the other articles, but since I have a background and career in Art History, I feel compelled to comment on this essay.
In brief, I find it completely uninteresting and uneducated. He engages in the typical knee-jerk mystification of art that revolves around fixing some specific tipping point in History as the moment when things went from good to bad, and ascribes this turn to a form of malice or stupidity. Unsurprisingly, he can't really offer any concrete examples, quotes, dates, works, exhibitions or discursive shifts and needs to rely on completely nonsensical vibe-based generalisations that are by and large provably false.
This is pretty much the exact polar opposite of the development of the public reception of art in Western Society. On the contrary, the turn of the century saw the downfall of the Salon, with its highly academic selection process and extreme emphasis on complex, highbrow subject matter (being able to "read" a painting and divulge its mythological, historic or religious contents having been a key element of art discourse and prestige since the Renaissance), and the ineffable rise of the Gallery, which classed taste and value by means of the free market without institutional gatekeeping.
The Impressionists are of course the eminent example of an art movement rejected by the academic elites and their official Salons, only to be such a spectacular success among the general population that Napoleon III saw himself pressured to form an entirely separate Salon just for their work.
Of course, his claim doesn't hold for the avant-garde period either - the 20th century begins with the Fauvist and Cubist movements, both of which draw their names from extremely negative press reviews by the established art circles in Paris ("fauve" meaning savage, and "Cubist" meant to deride its lack of depth beyond its visual formula). Once again, the elite art snobs from illustrious collector families and high positions in art academies were the main push against the early modernist movement. If one has an absolute minimum background knowledge pertaining to the history of Art Academies, this is obviously unsurprising, since elite Academies historically always initially resist stylistic and thematic shifts in art - the same thing happened to David's early paintings, which were Neoclassical at a time when Rococo was still the academic style of choice. It's just the nature of institutions to become resistant to change once their power and status is entrenched.
The actual critique he could have made, but didn't, is that on the contrary, the democratisation of art and art criticism that happened in the 19th century with the proliferation of journalism and literacy, the inauguration of public museums, and the rise of a new class of bourgeois art collectors is what led to the crisis of modern art, which lost clear formal and narrative criteria necessary for its evaluation. Does he seriously believe art during the Renaissance was not an elite, snobbish affair? Pretty much every single painting you will see in a museum up until the 19th century was either commissioned by the Church or the Aristocracy, with more humble social classes contenting themselves with mediocre family portraits and decorative still lives which have largely been lost to time due to no one caring enough to preserve them. The very right to own and perpetuate figurative depictions was considered a noble duty not suited for the common rabble.
Modern art became an elitist affair the moment it became entrenched within the institutions and academies that produce and manage artworks, same as every successful art movement before them.
Furthermore, he places an emphasis on craft being the guiding criteria of pre-modernist art, which is such a hilarious spit in the face of the artistic Western tradition since the Renaissance, which explicitly, insistently and desperately wanted to elevate itself about the status of craftsmanship and join the realm of "high arts" like poetry and literature, whose value is derived by ingenuity, singularity, and formal application of philosophical and intellectual pursuits. Dürer instantly comes to mind as the artist who constantly insisted that no, he was not a craftsman, but something more akin to a visual poet. If he had read some first semester Art History 101 literature like Vasari's Biographies, he would see that this division between craftsmanship and artistry was a foundational concern of Western tradition since the Renaissance and quite literally defined the process and output of many Old Masters.
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
I recommend anyone to take a look at André Félibiens lectures on painting, which took place during the founding days of the Royal Academy in Paris and explicitly seek to lay out a hierarchy of values and criteria for critiquing painting - unsurprisingly, complex mythological and religious scenes were considered the high watermark, with still lives and landscapes at the very bottom of the list.
This is only vaguely applicable to the highly figurative Academicist styles that emerged from David's Neoclassicism and were the elite style of choice in the mid-19th century, placing an emphasis on lifelike details well suited to recuperation by photography. Most Old Masters were obviously interested in expressive and psychological visual effects that go beyond just being lifelike - Mannerism's dreamlike serpentine, elongated bodies, Rembrandts' emotive spatial distortions, Goyas grotesque, writhing faces, the list goes on and on. Not to speak of the expressive caricatural tradition of Dutch miniature painting found in Bruegel or Bosch, nor the exaggerated and bombastic compositions of Baroque art, which was Europe's single most durable and lasting artistic tradition since the end of the Middle Ages.
To reduce Western painting to its technical ability to render figurative depictions on a flat surface is to essentially say that Western art peaked and concluded with the Ghent Altarpiece in the 15th century and had no meaningful developments since.
Now, I'm not really a defender of modernism in art, and I do think the past 100 years have been largely a period of decline and loss of previous artistic achievements - but I am a defender of serious analysis and criticism, and this essay is a complete joke on those fronts. How one can look at the extreme fervour and dynamism of the early avant-garde, its fanatical Utopianism and avowed quest to create forms of expression that resonated with normal people's lives under rapidly changing social, technological and political conditions and come away thinking it was due to the artists feeling "emasculated" is just the boring, vindictive anti-intellectualism of someone who has a bone to pick and lets his emotional resentment get the better of him.
I could go on picking apart more of this essay - he packed an impressive amount of bullshit into one single page - but I think I've largely made my point. Don't read this if you're looking for good criticism of modern art - watch the Shock Of The New by Robert Hughes or Ways Of Seeing by John Berger. They actually know what they're talking about.
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.
Picasso has High favorability, rather higher than Monet.
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