The way I think about it is high art is considered innovative for its time.
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.
As modernism progressed, the avenues left to explore seem to get increasingly wild and crude in an effort to say something different... seemingly all that's left now for modern art is to share some unique perspective of the world, the rougher the medium, the better. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is spectacular to me because it really called where it was all ending up.
> The way I think about it is high art is considered innovative for its time.
> 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.
Artists in the art world seem to have bought in to a nihilistic worldview, too. My impression of the NYC artistic world (literary and visual) of the early 20th century is a bunch of people having parties and trying unsuccessfully to find meaning in life.
While I feel in general most modern art is BS (ie. I went to a Mark Rothko exhibition in Paris recently and still don't 'get' it, that godly color theory application or whatnot) I do feel some of the turn of the 20th century stuff fascinating and highly creative - folks like Klimt for instance.
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.
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.
As modernism progressed, the avenues left to explore seem to get increasingly wild and crude in an effort to say something different... seemingly all that's left now for modern art is to share some unique perspective of the world, the rougher the medium, the better. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is spectacular to me because it really called where it was all ending up.