Those examples have some similarities, but - while they had their contemporary detractors - they were, for the most part, formally educated participants in the art establishment of their times.

I'd liken it more to the works of Henri Rousseau or even maybe the French Decadent movement.

The funny thing is, the classical art of Greece, probably looked much different than how we think about it. It was much more colorful and vibrant, it's just that all the pigment washed away. https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/styles/l...

Cities adding art back onto the walls, is probably closer to how the ancient Greek cities actually looked. Our classical architectural view of pristine white walls is wrong. https://exploringgreece.tv/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/parthe...

I refuse to believe that the people who made some of the best ancient statues had an artistic sense of a 5-year old when it came to color...

Obviously ancient status were colored but probably in a much nicer way. No way something like:

https://static.frieze.com/files/inline-images/web-cg-h-102-a...

could be even close to the original ( considering that the Romans generally managed to somehow get skin tones more or less right in the few paintings that survived)

The problem is they do careful analysis of statues and find evidence of pigmentation, but obviously they're only looking at the remnants of the base coat and don't see any of the careful detailing that almost certainly went towards making these statues look very lifelike (judging by the realistic quality of the sculpture itself.) And so the recreations look flat and uncanny because they're essentially unfinished.

I wonder if another problem might be fashion trends. Sometimes bright, contrasting, colours are in style and feel normal. https://www.apparelsearch.com/terms/images/cher-aerobics-leg...

I don't think the bright colors are the problem, just the opposite actually.

Particularly in this example: https://static.frieze.com/files/inline-images/web-cg-h-102-a...

The bright clothes are fine, but his skin is awful. It's flat and lifeless, like a cold corpse drained of blood. It looks like they put the primer coat on then left it unfinished; I think that's literally what they did. Maybe this look is what they were originally going for, but I don't think so. Look at the detail on that guy's knees, they look just like real knees. I don't believe the original artists went through so much trouble to sculpt hyper-realistic knees then let some intern half-ass the paint job.

I think it's also current museum aesthetics where they do enough to give you the idea but don't want to take any artistic license beyond what's provable. So the painting could have been more subtle especially for those close to the viewer

Maybe you should reevaluate where your own aesthetic comes from https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/04/27/whitewas...

I think the reproductions suffer a bit because the distance these statues were from a viewer varied -- but just like murals

> Maybe you should reevaluate where your own

No, I don’t think so.

The way some of these “reconstructions” look is just plain awful. And based on the surviving examples of frescoes and paintings they would look as just awful the the Romans.

> I think the reproductions suffer a bit because

They suffer because there is no shading for one thing. The skin and hair especially just look awful. It has nothing to do with the bright colors (I get that part).

Indeed, worse than that the myth of white statues as an aesthetic was created by racist euronationalists in the late 19th c. https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/04/27/whitewas...

That's not a very good argument. Putting aside the present topic, this argument doesn't address the substance and instead lazily falls back on an association fallacy: "if people said P about A in the past and we no longer think that, and you say P about B, then you must also be wrong". It's the same kind of progressive argument people use when they categorically dismiss any criticism of new music as just the same old hate old people always have for "new things". Boring, dismissive, unthinking, and refuses to consider that there might be valid criticism apart from the crankiness that does, in fact, exist. It assumes as a premise that art cannot be bad, or that it cannot be an expression of cultural decadence, whereas I claim that it can.

And I would actually claim that most Warhol is trash, good swaths of Dali worthless, and both Matisse and Gaugin mixed bags.

> It assumes the premise that art cannot be bad

The difference is that pieces of art can be bad, but you’re going to have to do a lot more work to dismiss an entire set of categories of art. Even the examples of Warhol, Dali, etc. are individual artists, not an entire medium.

Imagine arguing that there are exactly zero good pieces of software written in JavaScript bc JavaScript is a bad language.

When people say "it's bad so it's not art", they're challenging artistic value, essentially the same as what any art critic does. A cultured art critic who says "this is kitsch crap" and an unsophisticated man off the street who says "this crap isn't art" are both people expressing their dissatisfaction with the work. One expresses his thoughts in a way that is 'technically wrong' if taken literally and the other expresses his thoughts with jargon that is inaccessible to the general public.