Yet, on the other hand, if it doesn't harm anyone and the trust indeed bought the apartment, then no harm in keeping this quirky place alive.
Of course there are individual works of art or athletic performance that are significant enough to stand on their own. But those are few and far between.
If you're looking at stats, it's the same. Just a long list of events and scores which are all basically the same thing.
For a lot of art, if you don't know how or why it was created, it can be hard for many people to develop an attachment or strong emotional response to the artwork. For my part, I definitely have to work for it, and most art doesn't generate much of a flutter, until I read the backstory.
Big old paintings often include some of the story in their content, but not always. Modern art and sculpture much less so.
I can quite easily marvel at the raw technique of a Caravaggio painting. But going on technique alone, why would I spend time with Caravaggio over Dali, over Turner, over Hokkaido etc. It's only when I read the title, or the backstory that I understand, the _reason_ he was driven to paint it. And then I see the lighting, the glances, the composition, the postures, the hand positions and I marvel again, and the story and the technique emerge and recombine for me.
(art's a tricky example to offer here, especially old art. I totally get how some people have strong emotional reactions to some art, without the story. )
Stuff usually makes sense within context, there's lot's of buzz for example on Twitter about how some old stuff was beautiful and the new one is ugly. They are doing this for political propaganda and money but there's a reason why people tear down the old "beautiful" stuff to build the new contemporary thing and when doing it they thought that the old stuff was bad for one reason or another. Some day in the future people will be preserving some all glass facade building for it's significance when everyone else has moved to this new thing.
The historical significance is just one thing though, sometimes people preserve stuff for any reason. Sometimes, people preserve stuff because it's amazing that someone did this even if it's not a masterpiece in any way - like the restored version of Ecce Homo :)
Some of us really do prefer the old stuff, not just for the politics and money!
X is a stand-out work of genius, head and shoulders above everything else it was contemporary with, at the time it was made. It was the confluence of strong artistic vision, technical excellence and innovation, and near-flawless execution, where all the parts managed to come together cohesively without any thematic friction - which rarely happens in any project. The reason X is better than 99% of stuff made today is because it was better than 99% of stuff made then, too.
Someone probably will make something as good as X this decade, but expecting most things to be as good as X is absurd. Remember Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap.
Examples: pop-punk in early to late 00s, photorealism in paintings in 1900s, “boomer shooter” videogames of late 90s/early 00s, etc. I don’t see photorealism in paintings having a massive comeback or a nostalgia wave right now, but pop-punk and “boomer shooter” videogames have been having pretty strong nostalgia waves recently, and they are doing quite ok.
And I 100% agree with your overall point, people remember titans like the original DOOM/Quake, but forget the flow of all the lazy unimaginative derivative slop that eventually started proportionally dominating those niches (which is what eventually spelled out the end of the mainstream hype era for those, and let us enter the “they dont make things like that anymore” fallacy stage).
AFAIK with the proliferation of photography the people who used to do life-like painting of other people lost a lot of business and it seized being a profession.
For example, if you are old enough to witness the transition you can remember how much a fresh breath of air was moving away from the clutter and pertinaciousness of post modernist interior design into the functional and comfortable minimalism then only to go the the next phase seeking some more cozy spaces once the minimalism begin feeling impersonal and cold and then the designers remember how cool and inspiring some stuff from the 60s and 70s were.
Problem solving chain is only one force, there's also the desire force. As time change, people desire different things. At one point people may desire order if the world is too chaotic only to desire freedom later on when the world becomes too strict and rigid when trying to get things into order and all that reflects into the design of everything.
Another force would be economy and technology, old ideas that didn't work because the tech wasn't there yet are revisited or designs can be optimised for cost when times are tough. Tiny demons carved by hand on the facade are nice but when the demand for just getting into the plane at the cheapest cost is strong you can't make you airports to look like 1800s train stations.
I don't think this bit is true, or at least I don't believe these are "problems" being solved, when it comes to art. There are no problems, only changes. That's why being derivative is bad. It's a drive for change for its own sake.
BTW, this idea of "designers just make eye candy" is something I keep seeing in the AI Hype train folks. They enter a prompt and the AI generates an image of, let's say a chair that looks cool at first glance and they think that AI is ready to take away the design jobs. They are deeply mistaken because they have no idea what the designers actually do and what it takes to design a product and no, it's not about coming up with something to sit on and looks of a particular type, out of the blue.
Well, I'd say this is wrong, but not for that reason. The advances you list are all really engineering and materials science advances. Once an engineer shows you how to design a skyscraper using a framed tubes, you can draw 100 of them. AI might be able to do the drawing, but it probably won't be doing the structural engineering / materials science in the same ways.
The designers usually have some understanding on what's possible and they work with the engineers to tweak their design for feasibility.
No one cares about the 100 hundred drawings of skyscrapers. The soviets did it with the commie blocks, although practical its nowhere nearly as desirable as having a neighbourhood designed by people thinking beyond structural engineering.
It's not "beyond". It's just a different job, and generally speaking, one with a lower bar to entry. Doesn't mean it's not useful, but I think it's silly to talk as though this sort of design is so significant. Plenty of ugly buildings exist; all designed by architects.
It's not an original work after all, the computations are modelled into the software and it tells you if it will meet the requirements.
Definitely not. An engineer signs off the safety etc. All the non-cosmetics. You're right that it's computerised, but that's because it's not fashion - there's an objective "better" and so that can be programmed. Fashion, not so much. Until AI.
From the pictures it looks like there are parts that show real care but other parts that are kind of messy and maybe more half finished projects.
It seems possible, if not likely, these were unfinished pieces that were in-progress when the artist died. Perhaps many of these would never have been finished no matter how long the artist lived. You might look at one and see what had gotten a lot of attention and what hadn't, maybe even see what had gotten attention first and what later, and wonder about exactly why. It's pretty interesting, IMO.
Probably one good way to value art is its impact on the viewer. So that's obviously very subjective. But surely a variety is good. Or put it this way... the skillfully and richly crafted masterworks that you view in a museum are certainly worthy works of art. But if skillfully and richly crafted masterworks that you view in a museum are one of only a small set of forms of worthy works of art, you're putting art in a small, confining pen. That would really limit the impact it can have. Which, I think, means that's just a far too limiting a view of art.
Of course there is modern art where it can seem like anything can be considered art but even in those cases there is often work and talent involved. Maybe it's through the selection of which works to make public or the storytelling with the art pieces or coming up with new experiments.
We have "HODL" which is a cultural phenomenon, which itself is a typo.
We have numerous memes images of cultural significance which is made with very low production value because their original makers had a great idea but not very good image editing skills.
I don't think that "production correctness" or "precision" is a metric that art can be evaluated on.
A cultural phenomenon is not art in my opinion. I think things can be made by people and found interesting and well liked without them being art just as a natural phenomenon can be interesting and well liked.
Andries Kerpestien has a good series on some universal expressed aesthetic preferences in relation to architecture - https://casualrealism.substack.com/p/architecture-and-evolut...
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLyE3L8d/
My jaw literally dropped open that someone would want to paint over it. I did not get that feeling looking at the pics in the article.
Sometimes people with an IQ come along and remove the paint and everyone is flabbergasted at the beauty that was underneath.
Sorry, I get triggered by naive paint slinging.
Compare it to the TikTok house that was amazing and was going to be painted over before TikTok saved it https://www.tiktok.com/@samcooperrealtor/video/7200527242441...
Nothing in the house has substance. Like a tunnel or a building or if it was mosaics. These last 'forever' so you can move past beauty and see the creation of a thing.
A lot seems to be papier-mâché, even around the fireplaces. The fireplaces themselves might be clay. It comes down to who he was for the greater value. You go there to hear his story. But it's not a "wonderland", a type of performance art perhaps.
End of the day it is their money along with the crowd funders, in 50 years time it'll be historic simple because it is by definition.