Comment by wtcactus

The Girl With the Pearl Earring is considered a masterpiece because of the technological limitations of the time.

Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process. Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in blue. The expense indicated devotion.

Someone living in that time period would know anything in ultramarine is important.

Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real life. That is the central mystery of the painting.

But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold, because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"

Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized by AI.

This is not the art that's being destroyed by AI (in fact, I would say this academic ideas art is exactly the kind of art least likely to be supplanted by AI)

There are still non-modernist artists who focus on technique and sincerity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum

Get a brush and be the change you want to see.

Art also is a massive money laundering operation. Why make 10,000 fake invoices when you can make one $10mil invoice for something with zero definable value.

All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.

Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for your untalented child.

Rich people have destroyed the global art community.

Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty. Art's beauty can come in many obtuse ways, and doesn't even need to encompass aesthetic beauty.

The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.

Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.

To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.