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Dying beholder art8/25/2023 The great art historian Jacob Rosenberg wrote that quality in art "is not merely a matter of personal opinion but to a high degree. All that was left was personal expression. Monet, Renoir, and Degas still maintained elements of disciplined design and execution, but with each new generation standards declined until there were no standards. And, as with most revolutions, the first generation or so produced work of genuine merit. Today everybody loves the Impressionists. Whatever their intentions, the new modernists sowed the seeds of aesthetic relativism - the "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" mentality. Beginning in the late 19th century, a group dubbed The Impressionists rebelled against the French Académie des Beaux Arts and its demand for classical standards. How did this happen? How did the thousand-year ascent towards artistic perfection and excellence die out? The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just offers us a rock, - a rock - all 340 tons of it. Michelangelo carved his "David" out of a rock. Today the silly, the pointless, and the purely offensive are held up as the best of modern art. The profound, the inspiring and the beautiful were replaced by the new, the different, and the ugly. And they did this by demanding of themselves the highest standards of excellence, improving upon the work of each previous generation of masters, and continuing to aspire to the highest quality attainable.īut something happened on the way to the 20th Century. "The Night Watch"."The Thinker"."The Rocky Mountains." Master after master, from Leonardo, to Rembrandt, to Bierstadt, produced works that inspired, uplifted, and deepened us. "The Mona Lisa"."The Pieta…" "The Girl with a Pearl Earring." For a score of centuries, artists enriched Western society with their works of astonishing beauty.
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