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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.
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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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