I remember reading something a while ago that said that the visual arts were now essentially literature, which I think means that the attention to the aesthetic is now almost gone. The point is the intellectual point, whether that is on the nature of painting, “I can make a painting that’s just a big blue square!” or mankind, “War is a bad thing and I’m against it”.
I’m open to ideas about this, but it seems to me that this is what has alienated so much of the public: “It doesn’t look like anything!” or “But it’s ugly!”
Ok, artistic Dopers, what’s your input?
Painting has evolved a great deal over its history, with an accelerated evolution since the advent of photography. Abstract expressionism, with its focus on surface and process, and postmodernism, with its focus moved outward to include the artist the “frame,” have also been radical changes. What it communicates and how it communicates it has changed a great deal.
It will continue to change; any statement about the nature of painting that sounds final is false.
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word said something very similar to this 30 years ago. His overall point, however, was that art was being made to illustrate a thesis on the nature of art, and without understanding that written component the art itself could not be understood. It caused a ruckus when it came out, but after that point so few people paid any attention to art at all that any attempt at talking about it became one in-group talking to itself instead of the public.