FvB – I really don't think we're very far apart in our views. Still, your first point contains within itself its own counterpoint. Art is indeed, as you say, a reaction to developments in the real world ... including the developments that have produced those pristine white walled museums and galleries of the past 150 years or so where objects are appreciated for their aesthetic appeal and formal attributes rather than (or sometimes in addition to or in spite of) whatever religious or socio-political content, meaning and impetus lay behind their making. Some art (the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco) cannot be separated from its original context ... although tour groups coming to see Michelangelo's art are not the same as parishioners going to Mass. And the collections of 16th Century nobles included objects plucked from their original context along, say, the Silk Road and brought back to be sold to said nobles for aesthetic (and commercial) reasons, exotic objects of beauty no longer connected to whatever context produced them, so this is hardly a new development.

Your second point, if I correctly follow you, is one that I agree with. Appreciation for a given aesthetic falls in and out of favor over time. There are moments when the classical/formal/Apollonian is the favored ideal and others when the expressive/intuitive/Dionysian is ascendant. Furthermore, each time the spiral passes through one or the other pole the current social structure, technology, etc. of the time will have its influence as well. The great (and even not so great) art of any period influences the culture in ways that influence future aesthetic judgments. I've often been taken to task in aesthetic debates here for noting that one may dislike modernism or abstraction or expressionism but that does not mean that these fail aesthetically in any 'objective' or 'independent' way. Aesthetics are always in flux and open to individual taste.

Today's most lucrative art market is the New Class and so the artists who are most financially successful at the moment are those whose art appeals to that group. One thing that appeals to that particular group seems to be the seal of approval of overly intellectual theorists spinning complex webs of meaning to explain works that might otherwise be deemed lacking aesthetic substance. In the past it might have been the Pope or wealthy merchants who were determining which art and artists were most highly sought and compensated. Twas ever thus as you say.

At the same time art is now (as it was in the past) being produced that might be out of favor (e.g. highly formal realism without conceptualist subject matter) but which may well be reassessed at some point in the future when the aesthetic again shifts in that direction. While the artist may not live long enough to benefit, the valuations will rise for that work at that time. Art that is recognized as serious and with aesthetic value, even if out of synch with the dominant taste of the moment, is often protected, preserved and admired (even if by a minority group of collectors or scholars) while art that is merely an attempt to capitalize on a moment with little real aesthetic substance may have a moment, but often fades into the background once the moment is past.

Posted by: Chris White on April 16, 2008 12:23 AM