I think it’s likely you’re projecting your personal experience onto others. I knew someone who was obsessed with the Red Room by Matisse. He was in no way pretentious or academic in inclination, but something about the actual painting itself entranced him and he could disappear into it for long periods of time. I honestly don’t know what was so powerful about it for him, but he was clearly having a genuine experience different than mine. Authoritatively providing my conjecture regarding his ‘relative reaction’ would be immensely pompous.
Art is more than technique, the music performances that move us are very often not the absolute highest level of virtuosity. Photographs were incredibly common in my lifetime, but I was still very strongly affected by paintings on books, album covers and in museums.
Further, non-representative visual art has a rich history. You merely have to look at the amazing art produced out of Islamic aniconism.
It's not unique to art, nor does it speak to its importance. You could easily find someone who stares at ants for hours on end. What does it prove?
I think we have to understand its meaning and impact on a societal level and determine its usefulness or uselessness[1]. Not all art is useful and not all art is useless but some are one or the other.
[1]Very broadly defined and not focused on economic value, though being a. Inner dial success is also valid.
Art really shouldn't be measured on a useful or useless scale. How would we even determine adequate metrics for that? If we look at impact we'd need to consider The Bodyguard Soundtrack as high musical art.
Picasso was worth $250 million at his death in 1973 dollars. 1.6 billion in 2022 dollars from selling his own paintings.
Painters at one point were rock stars. Just like today's rock stars are social media stars and not a group of guys playing guitar/bass/drum/vocals.
Artistic mediums have their moment in time and then become niche, historical and retro once their time has passed.
Marble sculpture is no less amazing than in times past. That mediums time in the sun though passed a long time ago.
Just like if you go to an art gallery that arranges the paintings in period rooms, it completely obvious when photography became an up and coming medium and its effect on painting at the time.
I'm sorry but this really betrays history, even contemporary history.
We could point to a number of contemporary artists that are worth millions of dollars for whatever they are known for - you might even consider them 'rockstars', regardless of how myopic I find the term - but headlines that make it onto the "4 big websites" is not the same thing as being irrelevant.
For every "Picasso" you can cherry-pick from history there's a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Ai Weiwei, etc - All worth millions or, at the very least, "Rockstars" in their own right.
The idea that Marble Sculptures in Ancient Rome or whatever had passersby standing in amazement compared to today is not accurate. People walking into whatever temple for whatever God they were visiting would be just as bored by the marble back then as you are of marble now.
What's really changed is that accessibility to these things have exploded. More people than ever have access to Art, Art Tools, Art Education, and new Art Mediums. "Art" is in no-way dying out. Focusing so much on the "Medium" is missing the forest for the trees, honestly. (Which is to say, modern technology and socio/economic trends have a bigger effect on the use of Marble than "Marble as a medium", whatever that means. Sculpture is alive and well, I promise you)
This is a little bit rambly because your post just kinda says, "Art changes over time" and doesn't, in my view, have a wide-enough vision of the "why" but this is all to say that like, as far as this thread is concerned, Visual Art, if anything, is omnipresent in our lives - not less relevant than in times past. If anything, the presence of "Rock Stars" is an indication of too few talented people, instead of what we have historically which is an ever increasing number of extremely talented people. I just don't know how we can say Painting is less relevant now when more people than ever are doing it lol.
> People walking into whatever temple for whatever God they were visiting would be just as bored by the marble back then as you are of marble now.
What gives you this idea? You don’t think that constant exposure to having one’s human recognition instinct stimulated artificially has a tolerance effect? Isn’t it a bit strange that people put so much effort and resources into e.g. statues despite finding them as boring as we do today?
I'm having trouble deciding if your post is tongue-in-cheek agreeing with me or not so I'll just add some earnest flavor. I'm going to answer your questions in reverse order.
No, I don't think it strange at all that people put so much effort and resources into Art. The creator of the work gets a different kind of satisfaction than the people viewing it. These reasons vary from person to person but I've always liked my Highschool's Motto "Art for Art's sake". So it makes sense to put effort into creation. Personally, I love narrative and so when I'm creating sculptures or art of any kind I'm considering the narrative that goes into it. The effort is to achieve the narrative while considering tone and taste. A Nightmare Before Christmas would not be the same movie if it were all rendered as naturalistically as possible.
I'm not going to pretend to know the entirety of reasons people have for liking their spaces designed, but we do like shiny things and people can be particular about their environments. Yeah, it might be most efficient to put people into perfect cubes but I doubt the emotional well-being of most people would be met by this kind of environment. So, on that basis alone we have a reason to put effort and resources into decorating our spaces.
I don't really understand your second sentence. I'm not sure what "Human recognition instinct simulated artificially" even means. Do you mean our ability to recognize humans? Or our ability to recognize anything? Its a little short-sighted to view the whole of "Marble Statues in Ancient Greece/Rome, etc" as "Activating, artificially, our Human Recognition Instinct". Like, not only was a majority of the Art from that time lost/destroyed, and not all of the statues were of people, but those statues were humongous. David is like 17 feet tall. No one is going to mistake him for a human. Humans from antiquity weren't that different than the ones from today, at least no biologically/evolutionarily. So it'd be the same for them as any memorial statue is today - they fade into the background (While still providing some aesthetics, mind you)
What you're really missing by pulling out this single quote is something I touched on later in the post - Focusing on any individual "medium" is myopic in the conversation of Art's Cultural relevance, and the thread you sparked is just as marrow-minded. We're definitely in a period of time absolutely saturated with Art but we are by no means running on cultural fumes. Maybe the spaces you occupy are dead-zones but that's a personal choice IMO - Its beautiful and full of culture out here.
Art is more than technique, the music performances that move us are very often not the absolute highest level of virtuosity. Photographs were incredibly common in my lifetime, but I was still very strongly affected by paintings on books, album covers and in museums.
Further, non-representative visual art has a rich history. You merely have to look at the amazing art produced out of Islamic aniconism.