Hello good fellows. I am curious about the state of art these days, specifically about its shift ever since the late 19th century. I cannot fathom how something so beautiful and inspiring could regress into something so distasteful and primitive. I was wondering what may have caused this shift as the answers I have gotten from art history books are not satisfactory. They advocate for the camera replacing the mimetic function of painting and sculpture, but these mediums were hardly mimetic. Yes, they were based on natural observations, but creativity and the act of putting stories into marble, bronze or a canvas were involved. We can see this in sculptures dealing with greco-roman mythology. So what was it that caused such a rapid and abrupt change in the arts? Was it the spread of Marxism during this times? Was it the rapid advancements in technology this century saw? For goodness sake, whose idea was it to replace such magnificence with a thing so offensive to the eye and the soul? Forgive my inquisitiveness and perhaps ignorance, but I consider diving into the causes of this regression a matter of utmost importance.

>art these days
>posts art that is all decades old

>>17814023
>specifically about its shift ever since the late 19th century

>>17814018 (OP)
>these mediums were hardly memetic
Fine art was an accident that happened while people were trying to create perfect mimicry to appeal to the masses. People want to see themselves and their world, which look like a cross between modern art and instagram

>>17814018 (OP)
All representation is language, its sole purpose is to evoke a concept in the mind of the viewer.

Got that?

A picture is really a different kind of word. A poem is a kind of word. Eye contact is a word. These have no purpose other than to further the compounding intellect of humanity by cross-confirming ideas. New people always start from zero but the program, successful or not, is to have overall growth toward a greater understanding. It's easy to argue the modern world is more advanced than the renaissance, and has more art, but what really makes change feasible is the intellectual advancements made by fine art, which still exist. No one physically touches marble, but the words and concepts remain. Repeating them endlessly isn't the point, the conversation inevitably leads somewhere else if you're doing it right.

That being said, it's also a metric you can use to measure the degeneration of average citizens from certain peak moments of human competency. People can't read or write at that level, including complex words like art and poetry, because the cutting-edge is advancing to more stimuli and action rather than deep contemplation of what already exists. There's absolutely an argument that society should push back autism and make greater concepts of life the priority, rather than greater life. Turn everyone into artists, or theater kids with highly developed human interactions. There are a million different directions to go, it's exciting.

>>17814035
It has been shifting to AI generated furry porn for a quite a while now.

>>17814018 (OP)
The end of aristocratic patronage. That's it, that is the entire reason.