> The falling off of skill, realism, and other similar metrics
Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying artists now are generally less skilled than artists from back then...?
As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other forms of art?
Video games, movies, etc. typically do care more about skill and realism, but they're a different thing from "fine art", i.e., art in art galleries.
Somehow someone managed to convince the world that Hollywood is not real art, but some other arbitrary weird stuff is.
(To avoid confusion, I personally love the arbitrary weird stuff.)
The world knows this is art but some bullshit artists, pun intended, in New York pretend like it is not. Then other bullshit artists in other cities follow what the bullshit artists in New York are doing because most aren't creative or free thinkers at all.
I love galleries personally but it is a class of non-creative, closed minded, bullshit artists at this point.
Concept artists are highly skilled, but they do something different than the painters of yore. They turn around decent looking stuff in a few hours. It's very impressive, but it (naturally) lacks the depth & thoughtfulness achieved by painters like Caillebotte.
Meaning, whereas in the past, if you was the first one to figure out, say, perspective or some color, you was able to draw what others could not. You did something knew and you are remembered for it. Today, if you can draw super realistic portrait, you are one of many talented artists who learned that from a books and classes.
> As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other forms of art?
No one knows artists behind video games. I do not thing realism is the distinguishing things behind artists who do video games, movies or tv. It is more of scene design, lightning, camera work etc that gets to be judged from the art side.
'The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction' by Walter Benjamin is a great read. There's a short but dense preface outlining the topic in purely Marxist terms; Benjamin was a Marxist and the essay was written in 1935 following his flight from Nazi Germany. However, the body of the essay develops its argument from first principles and doesn't require familiarity or agreement with Marxist theory to appreciate.
By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. There was no where left to go, hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
As modernism progressed, the avenues left to explore seem to get increasingly wild and crude, because that's what's really all that's left.
> By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. Aside from the ultra-realism movement, there was no where left to go, hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
IMO instead of innovating, painters gave up when photography hit the scene. Just completely threw in the towel.
To this day, every method of printing has a very limited color space that fails entirely to capture the vibrancy and brilliance possible with paints. Paintings like the Blue Boy are impossible to truly convey in CMYK and painters like Hans Holbein the younger were capable of photorealism in the 16th century that took until the mid to late 20th century to replicate with photography, with the added benefit of artistic license.
I think it's entirely artists' fault that they lost the plot in the 19th and 20th century. It wasn't until graphic design software took away their advantage of the imagination-to-paper pipeline that they were truly doomed.
Sidenote: I think impressionism predates photography becoming a competitor. It doesn't predate the first photographs, but the movement started decades before photography was good enough to threaten artists.
The way I think of it is taking the neurosis of the human mind and putting it out on a medium in all its glory. I don't have a deep knowledge of art history though so I'm not sure if there is much of a prior, I just am aware of the bigger movements.
Perhaps in the future we'll spend more time recognizing the mastery of craft that industrial designers put into creating household lamps and such. Especially since the history is pilling up and ready to be mined for interesting content.
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780307594754/page/26/mode/...
The lost battles : Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the artistic duel that defined the Renaissance
Fun fact: Michelangelo was hired after a heavy snow storm in 1494 to build snow sculptures around the city of Florence — just before the Medici were exiled.
It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of a rivalry, for example:
https://artrkl.com/blogs/news/art-history-feuds-michelangelo...
https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-mic...
You can't really imagine this happening between top contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that wouldn't make much sense.