Comment by AlecSchueler
1 hour ago
> It's why there really isn't any "great art" anymore, at least in the classical sense
This is a tautology, no? There's plenty of great art being made today by people feeling the same emotions as those in the past.
1 hour ago
> It's why there really isn't any "great art" anymore, at least in the classical sense
This is a tautology, no? There's plenty of great art being made today by people feeling the same emotions as those in the past.
Well "great" is rather subjective. But in terms of collective agreement we can conclusive say there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today. As an artist I was invited to a much vaunted exhibition in Venice itself recently. It consisted of a woman sitting in urine ...but with a kind message asking bystanders to please not poop in her tank.. The link if you fail to believe it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/arts/design/venice-bienna...
Modern art and artists indeed do mirror the feeling of their age.
I do not think this pseudo-intellectual desire to ape art styles of the past is really very compatible with the soul of an artist. Artists make two things: what moves them, and what they are paid to make. Ideally, these are the same thing.
No one is stopping you from commissioning paintings such as the ones you revere as the peak of art, by the way. Open your wallet if that's what you want. That's how great art was made back then. But if the depth of your insight on the human condition is whatever you're posting here, I do not know if your commissions would capture the meaning you seem to want.
Your absolutely correct. The Venice exhibition was made with 600 thousand euros of public money. The great art of the last age was also commissioned by rich nobility, basically the same as there was no public funds at that stage of developmemt. So you admitted that the public purse and what it is willing to pay to commission for public art is useful measure of a pseudoscientific constant, namely that of the public consideration of the "great art" of that age. I'm not sure that fountains of human excrement convey the grandeur that your attributing to modern art however.
We can make better than the past for sure, there is no point to rehash the glory of old, but we so far have not. In archeology there is a constant and agreed upon "decadent" style that can indicate when cultures have experienced conditions, for external or internal reasons, that ultimately led to their decline and downfall.
It's amazing that we cannot recognize the same precursors in our own. But perhaps this is interdisciplinary blindness?