Hello good fellows. I am curious about the state of art these days, specifically about the shift that occurred in the late 19th century that seems to have guided the discipline to where it is today. 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 and paintings 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 the aformentioned 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.

Note: My sincerest apologies for having posted this on two boards, but I am in dire need of having as many insights as possible if I hope to solve the questions that plague my mind

Think of it a different way: why did 19th century artists make such hackneyed firetruck pictures of the same stock figures?

>>24520641 (OP)
It was WWI and its consequences. This is like, babby's first art history.

>>24520927
I beg to differ, work like The Scream by Edvard Munch, The Starry Night by Van Gogh and Rodin's Balzac predated World War I

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

>>24520641 (OP)
>For goodness sake, whose idea was it to replace such magnificence with a thing so offensive to the eye and the soul?
You don't like Basquiat and Pollock and the like?

>>24520927
Wrong.

>>24520641 (OP)
Don't listen to anyone else. The answer is Cultural Marxism and Jewish conspiracy. If anyone argues otherwise they are either in on the conspiracy or else have been deluded by it. Once Nietzsche laid out the proper role of art in liberating the blonde beast from Christianity (another form of cultural Marxism) the (((powers that be))) decided they needed to destroy art so as to siphon of the lifeblood and will to power of the Aryan man before he returned to full strength and shook off the shackles of his inferiors and slave morality. Trust no one who says otherwise.

>>24520641 (OP)
>So what was it that caused such a rapid and abrupt change in the arts?
The Kantian Copernican Revolution, aka the human as basis of all knowledge and matters of the intellect, including aesthetic, leading to the primacy of subjectivity.

There's also something perhaps to be said about the French Revolution with its notions of freedom and the individual, which is concomitant and influences romanticism. Look at the differences between Beethoven and Mozart, for example. Inner emotion, subjectivity, tragedy, equality.

>>24520641 (OP)
>I was wondering what may have caused this shift as the answers I have gotten from art history books are not satisfactory.
The erotion of the traditional values that made man inspired by a unifying ideal. That's it, really...

>>24520641 (OP)
The very traits that lead to ones success are typically the cause of their downfall.

>>24520641 (OP)
In music, the modernism of Schoenberg which lead to Webern, which lead to Boulez, Stockhausen, etc was a direct outgrowth or extension of romanticism, both on a technical level (harmonic ambiguity, large interval leaps, dissonance, motivic unity) and a philosophical level (aiming for individualism, expressing the true essence of things rather than a sanitized version of those things), and this was just pushed to such an extreme that even if the individual steps seem logical, looking at the end result makes you think something must have gone wrong. Then there’s Stravinsky’s modernism which I’m less familiar with but aimed to express primitivism, which is perhaps the same feeling that lead Picasso to his African period. But what Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Picasso, all had was a great reverence for the old masters, and also a mastery of the formal techniques of their respective art which I think a lot of later artists didn’t have. Also, there have always been a few great artists at a given time surrounded by a lot of mediocrity, but at least beforehand the mediocre artists were making inoffensive and pleasant art, but when the style has shifted to extreme abstraction and individualism, then the mediocrity seems significantly worse.

>>24520641 (OP)
Two things: Saturation and technology.

Students of art as well as art connoisseurs have stared at classic art pieces for tens of thousands of hours to the point where it seems like a been there, done that sort of thing. What will allow you to make a name for yourself? Doing something weird like canning literal shit or making art in the style of the old masters? The answer is of course the former as normies are far more likely to hang a print of a Van Gogh or Rembrandt on their wall than a painting handmade by an artist in their town, simply because the normie doesn't know the artist in their town even exists. This paradigm encourages what are effectively real life attention grabbing shitposts where some artist is encouraged to, for example, write something on a urinal and put it in an art exhibit, I wouldn't know who Marcel Duchamp was without him putting that urinal in the art exhibit 100 years ago and neither would 99.9% of people.

Then there's technology. Paintings and art started veering hard into abstractions the second the daguerreotype was first invented and further innovations in photography have only pushed artists into doing ever more weird things that a machine can't replicate. But if you thought art was weird now, then just wait, because art is going to start becoming highly temporal and performative now that AI can do anything Picasso and Monet could. Future art is going to be strange projects that actively change or transform with time or even rot or degrade to again do what a machine cannot.

>>24520641 (OP)
The shit on the right is literally CIA-funded propaganda

>>24521136
>art is, like, statues of based white aryan trad dudes and neoclassical architecture and nothing else, man
>obviosuly people started doing other shit because of le jews (simultaneously all-powerful, capable of controlling all earth, and pitiful weak little wretches) and no other reason
Fuck, you people are insufferable. I don't like a lot of modern art either but there's more to it all than /pol/ brainrot.

>>24520641 (OP)
>stories
You name it yourself. Art is no longer narrative, it is lyrical.

>>24520641 (OP)
I think it's a culture of self-indulgence. Call it capitalism if you want, but I posit that it's upstream of both capitalism and the ideologies opposed to it. Mankind saw itself as subject to the gods, or to a singular God, or to the form of the Good, in all cases art was an expression of the belief that somewhere there exists objective metaphysical truth and goodness. Artists attempted to imitate or pay homage to something higher than themselves. This also happens when artists have a reverence for other artists (Dante's relationship with Virgil or Joyce with Shakespeare, for example).
In the nineteenth century something changed, and mankind became its own divinity, and each man his own idol. Artists and critics became obsessed with the idea that there was nothing higher than themselves, no metaphysical perfection to achieve, no greatness worth imitating except their own. This ties into the capitalist and socialist views, as both are ultimately about the individual either achieving or being entitled to wealth, any other concerns be damned.
We aren't really enlightened, as enlightenment comes from a connection to a higher power; we just shut our eyes and cover our ears and proclaim the mantra that there is no higher power.

>>24521266
>Students of art as well as art connoisseurs have stared at classic art
If you get tired of appreciating art is because you're a soulless entitled piece of husk.

>>24520641 (OP)
James pollock was a nobody who was propped up by the CIA to confuse the soviets. Keep posting that goyslop.

>>24520641 (OP)
Money laundering.

>>24520641 (OP)
It was romanticism. The re-discovery of classical philophy which happened in the 19th century. Take for example this Seneca quote:

>The philosopher Attalus used to say that it was more of a pleasure to make a friend than to have one, ‘in the same way as an artist derives more pleasure from painting than from having completed a picture’. When his whole attention is absorbed in concentration on the work he is engaged on, a tremendous sense of satisfaction is created in him by his very absorption. There is never quite the same gratification after he has lifted his hand from the finished work. From then on what he is enjoying is the art’s end product, whereas it was the art itself that he enjoyed while he was actually painting. So with our children, their growing up brings wider fruits but their infancy was sweeter.

This is a Greek idea; the idea that truly great things are done not as a means to an end, but are instead self-contained. This is what philosophy is: self-reflexion. Modernist artists realized this and started implementing it: now the end product doesn't matter, what matters is the process.

>>24521136
>it's Christianity's fault because it just is okay, ignore the thousand different ways the ethnic character of the Jews is antithetical to Christianity and rebuked numerous times within church history
>>24521851
>you will own nothing and you will be happy
>woah that sounds like not a thing a Jewish subversion of the West would do

>>24523856
>you will own nothing and you will be happy
What does this have to do with marble statues?

>>24521136
Christianity point is retarded and for many historical reasons and shows you're probably just a /pol/tard but otherwise thread should've just ended at
>Jewish conspiracy
That I agree with

>>24524041
The crimes of the Dadaist

>>24520641 (OP)
There is only one Revolution; it has tentacles in all directions and as subversion is its modus operandi it is always subverting itself, so it is difficult to perceive as being one Revolution but in fact all Revolutions are united in their opposition to what is Holy and Good. It began with Luther, the first stage was of religious upheaval because man cannot be misled into other forms of chaos if his religious faith sits on sturdy foundations. Secondly the French Revolution, and others, destabilized political institutions, a process which peaked in 1848. From there it has been an easy matter to utterly degrade every aspect of man's public life by destroying and music.