Your Thoughts On Art

[Belacqua]

What examples can you provide of artists, specific works, or artistic movements which you don't like?

I'm not interested in the current big-money people. Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, Murakami Takashi, et.al. They produce objects, but the objects have no intrinsic value in my opinion -- they are more like tokens or place-holders for exchange value. Yayoi Kusama made interesting things decades ago, but it's now just brand goods. Banksy is famous for being "cool," supposedly, but the pictures he makes are of zero interest. 

I do wonder, however, whether it really offers many insights beyond the peculiarities of human psychology and aesthetics -- though illustrations and photographs certainly can.

Well, human psychology and aesthetics are big things. 

And it's not just an individual's psychology, but that of an age or culture. You said of Renaissance art that it was interested in ideal beauty, and this is a feature of the overall thought and values of that age, which is very different from our own. It is valuable to see alternatives to our own limited time. It allows us to see an enormous amount about differences from our time and place, and see that the range of possibilities is much greater. No single object lives in isolation. To know the Mona Lisa is to know the values, philosophy, goals, desires, economies, and beauties of an age which in some way can be a model for our lives. 

Remember the opposite of aesthetics is anesthetics -- unfeeling. And if you believe, more or less, "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," then aesthetics is a big deal.