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Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process. Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in blue. The expense indicated devotion.
Someone living in that time period would know anything in ultramarine is important.
Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real life. That is the central mystery of the painting.
But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold, because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"
Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized by AI.
Of course, the expensive paint is a part of the history of the period, and paintings like this one become a symbol of the period as a whole. Appreciation for the period is certainly part of the appreciation for the painting.
There are still non-modernist artists who focus on technique and sincerity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum
All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.
Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for your untalented child.
Rich people have destroyed the global art community.
The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.
Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.
To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.
This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.
The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.
From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?
You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.
Isn't that all art anyway?
This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.
I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.