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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.
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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