Art in decadence?

[Anomalocaris]

I have been getting into paintings lately, and I am inclined to believe painters nowadays lack the mastery, elegance and symbolism of the masters of old, such as Vermeer.

Perhaps the same can be said about literature, with writers such as Dante still unmatched?

Is this a subjective perception, or can it be objectively proven?

The arts were very much affected by the Kantian "Copernican Revolution." 

Prior to this change, it was thought that the objects of our perception were unproblematically presented to our consciousness. If we looked carefully, we saw what was there. 

What people thought art was for followed on from this basic epistemology. So for example many people thought that a good artist was one who could very accurately represent the appearance of the object. This is clear from Ancient Greek stories about painters, with the story of Zeuxis' grapes being the most famous illustration. This artist and Parrhasius had a contest to prove who could paint the most realistic picture. Zeuxis painted grapes, and they were so realistic that birds flew down to eat them. Sure that he had won, he tried to lift the curtain that was covering Parrhasius' painting. But it turned out that the curtain was painted. So Zeuxis admitted that Parrhasius had won, because Zeuxis had fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled Zeuxis. 

Anyway, the point is that trompe l'oeil style realism was the goal, at least in this case. 

Styles and goals varied, but it's largely true to say that an artist's goal was to select a worthy subject and to present it as attractively as possible. What they deemed "worthy" of course could vary, but subjects were usually royalty, other elite people who could afford a portrait or who were deemed to deserve one, or religious subjects. They might depict famous battles or inspiring events from history. 

As you know, Kant changed our ideas about how we perceive the world. He taught us that there is no pure mirror-like reflection of the object in the mind, that what we create is an interpretation, with a more or less tenuous relation to the thing-in-itself. At this point people's idea of the artist's role changed. Instead of accuracy being a goal, the individual artist's mental interpretation became the focus. You can see this most clearly in poetry, probably. Before if a poet wrote about flowers, he wrote about characteristics that the flowers have, their symbolism, etc. But when you read Wordsworth you can see that the subject of the poem is not the flower but the poet's reaction to the flower. What it calls up in his emotional world. 

This is how Romanticism got started, and it's still pretty much the framework we're in today. After the change, what became important was not the great quality of the object depicted but the great way in which the artist depicts it. Van Gogh can paint worn out work shoes, and this painting is deemed as important or as beautiful as a Bouguereau Madonna. (Not to everybody of course -- tastes differ -- but the fact that the shoe painting is deemed to be historically important at all is due to this change. 

The same trend extends into the 20th century, when Surrealism makes the activity of the artist's mind the only real subject of the work. And of course real greats like Picasso are all about HOW they paint, not WHAT they paint. Their mind's interpretive style is the subject of the work. 

When we talk about a proposed drop of the arts into decadence, this history is crucial. Before Romanticism, the arts were expected to reflect and celebrate the values of the culture. These were often thought to be transcendent values -- that is, not changeable by fashion, and not the production of the artist himself, but facts about the world. So of course people had likes and dislikes, but these were seen as secondary to the timeless values which the artists strove to show. 

Being a modern guy myself, I am in no way opposed to the Romantic change. I value very highly the unique way of seeing that each artist uses -- often the more unexpected the better. So for example Lucian Freud painted nudes who were not gods or goddesses, but regular people, usually shown in extremely unflattering ways. And he painted them in a way which no one had quite done before. A lot of people are put off by his way of seeing, but there's no denying that as a viewer of nature he has an interpretation which surprises and shocks -- those of us who enjoy the frisson of this shock can admire the extreme attention he has given to seeing the world. 

But you can see the danger that's also inherent in the post-Kant change. If art is no longer supposed to depict those values which society holds to be transcendent, then there is a danger of it falling into mere personal taste. This certainly isn't inevitable -- I can cite good reasons why the idiosyncratic viewpoints of everyone from Gericault to Picasso do in fact embody important, non-personal values. But the expression of values is no longer built in. 

And this leads us to an art world with a very weak foundation. If transcendental values are no longer recognized or depicted, then we really are left with just every-art-lover-for-himself. "I like it" need not be justified and cannot be argued. 

And then, as you can see, we're in the world of consumerism, where we buy it because we like it, and what gets famous is what sells most, and fashions come and go as quickly as they do in clothing. 

When art is no longer expected to do anything other than please the customer, then decadence is inevitable.

Bel still bitterly bemoan the demotion of transcendental delusions and lies by the Copernican revolution which revealed them in their true natures,  and detest the decadence of the freedom to be curious and experiment, and to be critical and rigorous, that added so much to genuine knowledge.

He thinks his view gains in respectability proportional to the instances of name dropping and the word count in his posts.