What is interesting and telling is that they showed a 'name' like Caravaggio, and not any of the countless contemporary painters who are every bit is technically skilled as Caravaggio was. If the classical visual style was still relevant in itself, every art gallery would be showing off those contemporary artists.
The fact that you can't really think of any artists or ever see their work out in the world kind of proves my points.
However, I've not got a horse in this "classical is overrated" race.
The first to do something are remembered, those who come after must be significantly better or different to be recognized. If someone wants to see Caravaggio's style, they are likely to simply see Caravaggio - it's simply name recognition, nothing to do with the "relevancy" of the style itself, whatever that means (Popularity? Or a self-fulfilling justification for whatever style the art world elite is pushing?)
And there are in fact newer artists with name recognition that painted in a representational style (but not the exact same style), e.g. Dali, Frazetta, Giger, Beksiński.
Not knocking the skill involved, being a high fidelity human rendering engine takes a lifetime of dedication as well as a base level of natural talent which very few possess.
Maybe I am exaggerating my perceptiveness, but being shocked by Caravaggio paintings is not at all uncommon.
The machine may threaten to usurp the mass market but the few, skilled organics will always, hopefully, have artisanal works to sell.
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.
I think we have to understand its meaning and impact on a societal level and determine its usefulness or uselessness. Not all art is useful and not all art is useless but some are one or the other.
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.
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.
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?
On the other hand, the statues were often painted, so they looked more interesting than the bare marble we see now.
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.
A lie promulgated by modern art as justification for forcing out all prior art styles and aesthetics, but nothing could be further from the truth. Have you ever seen photos like the following?
https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdzislaw-beksinski/untitled-1976
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajikazawa_in_Kai_Province
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Aivazovsky#/media/File:St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)
https://www.bonhams.com/zh-cn/auction/27421/lot/413/kimura-b...
Perhaps a course in art history would help you understand that visual art has never been solely about image reproduction. Even cave paintings were allegorical. My goodness.
When the reality is that people are still very much interested in the extent of human prowess AND other folks (often overlapping) are interested in the extent of mechanical prowess (We call those folks engineers and they are much closer to Art enjoyers than not).
There's no doubt that Photography had an affect on "Peoples" idea of "What is Art" or "What do I value in visual Art" but... so does everything? Being extremely wealthy or extremely impoverished can destroy a relationship to Art. Its not so linear as, "All people care about is the ability to render images realistically"
I feel like I could type a novel around this concept but I'll leave these seeds planted, for now.
B) What an artist produces with a rendering engine will be starkly different from that of an amateur with the same engine. Art isn’t medium or technology.
If this were true then the Impressionism movement would never have come after the Renaissance. But it's not, there's more to visual art than just reproducing what we see with our eyes.
Can you imagine what seeing a nice painting of a person was like when you had never seen any other kind of artificial image in your life besides handmade ones? It was probably mind blowing.
Photography has probably totally destroyed our relative reaction to visual art, like someone who eats way too much sugar trying a sweet apple.
But now we seem to be running on cultural fumes in this area. It’s as if people still bought hand cobbled shoes for millions of dollars and displayed them pretentiously.