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Essentially some point in the last 500 years, but probably 200-350 years ago (being deliberately broad) classical art was “solved”. Developments in perspective, the teaching of art, color, etc etc meant that certainly by the early 19th century you couldn’t really, as an artist, make a more beautiful painting of a subject in a naturalistic (ie beautiful, realistic, aesthetically congruent style) in an innovative way. There are still many classically trained artists and for a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a beautiful painting from a really good Chinese artist in a naturalistic style of whatever you want.
At that point, what does the artist do? The field has been solved, so once you spend a few years developing the fine motor skills, technique and so on in a classroom you just spend another 50 years doing the artistic version of churning out the same table 10,000 times. Many, probably most working artists did this and still do this. There are still portrait artists and video game concept artists and classical landscape artists and so on who follow these rules to the letter and just paint ‘thing, following rules’ with some technical skill.
But for the artist who wants to be innovative in terms of technique, what is there to paint or draw? You can draw something new, be the guy who does portraits of SpaceX rockets or NVIDIA GPUs or something and maybe solves some minor challenge of framing or perspective involved. Kind of a niche, and limited demand. Or you can experiment with technique in a way that violates the classical laws of beauty, perspective, framing, etc that are ‘solved’. That largely describes the last 150 years of modern and then contemporary art. It isn’t a grand conspiracy but it’s not necessarily the most flattering way of viewing the profession either.
You're kind of just doing what I warned against in my post though. "No one could really be into this stuff. We all know what 'beauty' is, after all; so artists must just be screwing around because they don't have anything better to do". I explicitly disagreed with all these points. You're still incredulous that people could be pursuing "modern art" because of their own intrinsic interest in its own intrinsic aesthetic value.
Obviously something historically unique did happen in the late 19th/early 20th century that changed the trajectory of high art. But that was due to many competing factors and isn't just reducible to "linear perspective was solved". Nor were modern artists the first artists to do anything weird/experimental: see for example Hieronymus Bosch.
Not at all. I enjoy a lot of modern and contemporary art. But I recognize that it emerged in part because technical issues were solved. Movie CGI is approaching this level now (even without AI), where it’s no longer impressive by itself so there needs to be a stylized or sometimes even incongruent element to be visually interesting.
To be fair to contemporary artists and even moreso to art critics (much maligned), traditional landscapes really are beautiful, and if you (like most even well educated people) visit an art gallery once a year at most then they’re attractive and stimulating. But if you visit a gallery or see new art every day? They’re obviously going to start boring you. The clashing, sometimes (often) overtly ugly nature of a lot of visual art produced over the last century is often more interesting. And contemporary art especially isn’t made for the general public (with the sole exception of architecture and sometimes a particularly ugly logo for a public event or something), it’s made for a relatively small community of people who consume it all the time.
Weird, ugly art has also been the norm in elite art circles for the better part of a century now, though. You'd think if a contemporary young artist would be sick to death of anything, it would be the ugly, sterile technical exercises dressed up in extreme left wing politics that old professors have been shoveling for generations. Art critics aren't spending 12 hours a day marinating in normie-approved traditionalist landscapes; they're spending their days reading paragraph-long plaques misusing the word "phenomenology" to describe why childlike stickfigure drawings are an important critique of capitalism.
Does anyone actually still find anything novel or exciting about contemporary art? We ran out of taboos to transgress and forms to deconstruct in interesting ways decades ago.
The problem is say you’re a young artist looking to make your mark. If you’re classically trained (which many are) you can churn out classical landscapes and portraits but there is literally nothing to distinguish them from what countless very technically skilled Chinese, Viet and other artists are putting out for $250 online. In addition, say you’re a critic. What is there to say about that? You can say things about ugly art, or wacky art that supposedly means some bullshit, for better or worse.
What can you say about another very nice alpine landscape that captures the Matterhorn at dawn, or a view of the Empire State Building for example? “Very technically proficient, captures the scene well.” Yes, the very very best classical art has enough mystery for books of analysis. But you’re probably not going to paint the Mona Lisa.
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I find myself getting bored of contemporary art much faster, when I visit museums, than I get bored of classical art. It's not like you can't be bored by ugliness.
True, but I think in general the experience of really big galleries / museums is bad here. Your eyes will glaze over at a hundred paintings at the Vatican galleries or the Met that you could stare at for hours and get much out of if you saw them independently for twenty minutes on a random day, something like the Uffizi is best experienced as a search for a few pieces of particular personal interest rather than a general browse, at least in my opinion. The jarring nature of a lot of contemporary art only exacerbates it.
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Right, but at the moment it's largely funded with public money for the edification (theoretically) of the public. Especially if you go beyond visual art to the other inbred arts (theatre, poetry, literature as opposed to bestsellers, much architecture).
I broadly agree with your diagnosis - I've watched e.g. Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation go from having relatable, good recommendations to really much more of 'does this reanimate some spark of life in my breast' and he even disavowed many of his original recommendations that were too normie because he thought they were dull in retrospect. But the weirdos need to be given their own private space to work and we need to acknowledge that they're weird and shouldn't be doing things for the general public.
Which is both the blessing and curse of individualism.
The duty of individuals in such a system is that they need to acknowledge that they're weird, and that the general public shouldn't be emulating them if they don't already know they're compatible with weirdness (in contrast to how human nature/instinct normally work). But knowing that in the first place usually requires enough disagreeability that they can't follow that rule.
And after you've cleared that hurdle, "knowing what advice to ignore and what to integrate" is itself very difficult. It might not be worth your time/energy to be special even if you're above-average.
The problem is that, when these people are successful, people start trying to copy their methods without being able to copy what made them able to succeed with those methods, especially when that copying is because they want an excuse to be lazy and get credit for indulging their base instincts. (This is the "Visionary X was an asshole to his workers, so that means it's OK for me to do it to mine" thing- but you are not X, and don't offer the value he does. This is kind of an emergent property of societies where the class structure is perceived/taken as morally good to be flat.)
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Right, I think we’re mostly in agreement. In terms of public funding I think it’s now widely acknowledged that these are jobs programs for the children of the upper middle class, which as far as welfare goes doesn’t seem obviously worse than the far larger numbers spent on the underclass, migrants, asylum seekers, prisoners, pensioners who spent a lifetime on minimum wage and so contributed nothing and so on.
Re Yahtzee video game critics are a great example. I don’t even think a video game critic can fairly evaluate a yearly shooter or a Ubisoft open world or something like that because these games are so inherently boring to people who play video games all day that they really can’t see them the way the intended audience does. The only exceptions are things like Grand Theft Auto that have a built-in exemption due to the hype and developer’s legacy.
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But already this narrative assumes that artists have to be these geniuses who invent something new all the time, or that there is a specific task to be solved (e.g. to make the most realistic perspective- and color-accurate depiction of the thing as if looking through a rectangular window). In many cultures art was not so artist-as-superstar-genius-centered, but more about repeating the motifs of the culture, establishing a connection with their tribal ancients etc. Ancient Egypt managed to keep a more-or-less constant art style (I'm sure this makes the egyptologist cringe, but change was certainly much slower). In fact, it's a cultural value question whether individual-based innovation is placed above integrating into and expressing one's community tradition. It's similar with writings and stories, which were in older times not so connected to specific authors and would rather float around and have different versions and variations, quite unlike today's intellectual property ideas or ideas around plagiarism.
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How about coming up with new techniques to do the classical beauty more efficiently, more quickly? Perhaps by learning linear algebra and doing it a lot really really fast. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where generative AI isn't called AI and was developed by artists trying to come up with new and innovative ways to make themselves stand out.
I think there are still visual combos of technique and modern subject matter/point of view to explore, even in traditional figurative painting. See for example Dana Schutz, someone who is making exceptional, critically acclaimed paintings that are stylised but not abstract.
I like the idea of artists coming up with generative AI btw. I wonder what they'd have done with it? Probably they would have tried to monetised the output instead of the mechanism.
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