Are Today’s Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters?

A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see

Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition.

In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.

This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.

Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.

This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit.

So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it.

Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't.

As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first.

The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed).

This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists.

Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).

Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.

You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype.

But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all.

Is that what you mean to say?

That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.

We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions.

If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question.

Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind.

Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.

The bullfight paintings define to me how a master can do so much with so little:

https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jp...

But as in sports, or sciences, or architecture, or engineering, what the old masters had to discover or invent then became part of the standard curriculum, and could be refined, built upon further, and better tooling could be designed and taught.

Grant that they don't have anything interesting to write about and it's too expensive to build decent buildings, but the poetry is indisputable.

I tend to believe that, given how intensive we train players these days, but are we actually certain that it is the case? I guess we could ask a chess engine to rate all available games but that would not be terribly convincing because they were playing a different style, against the players of their time (unlike a running competition, you really need two players to play a game of chess). Also, for some past players we don't have that many games to begin with.

Take something more objective than fine art, like Roman Concrete [1]. To this day the Pantheon is the largest freestanding dome in the world because of the concrete's disproportionately good durability and longevity. It puts modern mass produced concrete to shame.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

As an artist, you should know that a camera does not represent reality, it flattens and distorts it in such subtle ways that often art of the thing is a better likeness than the actual thing. It's one of the most basic steps in any art class -- to draw reality, not what the camera gives you, and is the reason why Botanical Artwork is still highly favoured over images (along with other reasons, like being able to represent the most important parts of the plant accurately in a general sense as opposed to a specific specimen).

Hyper-realism, in my experience, also tends to be based off of images and still has that "unreal" skewed/distorted perspective thing going on.

I feel there's a lot of snobbery among artists and collectors and they look down on this kind of thing tho.

These sort of phases have always bothered me.

Art if about whatever you want it to be. My kid painting a dinosaur that looks like a scribble is art. A masterful recreation of a photograph in oil paint is art. T shaped lines on a page that have 'hidden meaning' is art.

Portraying someone realistically is as much art as throwing paint at a canvas with a particular meaning in mind is art.

It's all art. There's nothing wrong with enjoying art that doesn't have some hidden meaning. I love realism for the skill involved. I love abstract art for the ideas involved and the thought it provokes.

Enjoyment of visual art is entirely subjective, you like it or you don't, but it's still art.

There is so much of a "gatekeeping" sense when it comes to the question of "what is art", especially in the sense that "if you don't understand it your not appreciating it". You are allowed to like it just because of the way it looks.

OP. Yeah, I guess I can see that now. Honestly, I did a search for Salvator Tuesday after a friend mentioned it, saw this link, thought the examples shown were interesting and the question intriguing. It’s one I’ve asked about music, literature and other topics many times.

Agree, his analysis is very limited. The better not to scare off any potential customers, I suppose. If anyone knows of a more academically sound paper or exhibition on these lines, I’d click that.

Who are "the best artists"?

According to who?

And what makes you think "the best artists" have to follow fashion?

I’m not being sarcastic; who is walking around talking about a coherent, optimistic and appealing future?