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> Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. I don't think that follows at all. My favourite cafe has almost perfected my morning Americano, but that's exactly why I enjoy going there. The TV series that provoked the strongest emotional response in me wasn't doing something nonrepresentational, it was doing exactly the list of tropes that you'd expect to provoke that emotion, just executed in a really polished way. And even - especially - if we talk about pictures, there have been plenty of representational works that left me awestruck by their beauty. Look at, say, Sparth's spaceships (which couldn't possibly be replaced by photographs, even though they're "photorealistic" in some sense). Heck, look at Luis Royo, or the dragons on my college friend's deviantart. Even if you just want to talk about photorealistic oil paintings, take a look at the aeroplanes and board meetings in the China Art Museum and tell me those don't make you feel something. The things that people found beautiful and inspiring and provocative for centuries can still be all those things, and the idea that everything that can be done with representational, conventionally beautiful artwork has been is as absurd as the idea that everything worth doing in fine dining or orchestral music or classical ballet has been done. Humans are good at pulling meaning out of noise, even when there's no actual meaning there - consider rain dances, or the face of Jesus on a shower curtain. Of course ambiguity has always been a part of art - the famous Mona Lisa smile, or a lot of poetry rests on things that can be taken in different ways by the reader. I'm sure it's possible to look at a random pattern of brush strokes and have a meaningful emotional response - heck, I'm pretty sure I've done it myself. But surely there should be some equivalent of a double-blind test; art that performs no better than a placebo should not be considered as art, just like in any other field. And I'm convinced a lot of modern art would fail that test - e.g. Damien Hirst tells a story of how he tried to deliberately do one of his spin paintings badly, but ended up with one that was indistinguishable from the others. All of the art forms I talked about in the previous paragraph have a better hit rate at provoking interesting emotions and insights than modern art (and I don't think it's just a matter of accessibility - classical ballet takes a fair bit of effort to be able to appreciate it fully). So it seems crazy that the art world is so exclusively, overwhelmingly focused on non-representational, looks-like-random-noise works. If modern art really was just a scam, what would you expect to be different? What would it take to convince you that there's no there there? |