That might have been a part, but it's more that the idea of self-expression as the prime value in art is mostly a 20th century thing. The falling off of skill, realism, and other similar metrics is also a 20th century thing and largely came from photography and mass manufacturing. There's probably an essay or book out there covering the two intertwining topics, but I can't think of any offhand.
It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of a rivalry, for example:
You can't really imagine this happening between top contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that wouldn't make much sense.
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.
There's probably an essay or book out there covering the two intertwining topics, but I can't think of any offhand.
'The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction' by Walter Benjamin is a great read. There's a short but dense preface outlining the topic in purely Marxist terms; Benjamin was a Marxist and the essay was written in 1935 following his flight from Nazi Germany. However, the body of the essay develops its argument from first principles and doesn't require familiarity or agreement with Marxist theory to appreciate.
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I didn't mean that artists are less skilled today, but that realism and technical skill are generally considered less important today than in the past. "Top" artists today are usually not considered so because they have amazing technical skills at drawing/painting/etc. The metrics for success are a bunch of other things I won't get into here, but hyperrealistic portraits aren't typically considered to be art worthy of being in Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth (two of the top contemporary art galleries.) Whereas they would have been in the era of say, Dürer.
Video games, movies, etc. typically do care more about skill and realism, but they're a different thing from "fine art", i.e., art in art galleries.
Your video game comment made me think: maybe the modern equivalent of the art scenario I mentioned is in commercial art like video games or movies, both of which still have genres and are often directly compared to each other – "Call of Duty is a better FPS than Medal of Honor," and so on.
It makes a lot more sense to consider Hollywood and video games as the proper successors to classical art, and to see contemporary art as only a small strand in the evolution of art.
Somehow someone managed to convince the world that Hollywood is not real art, but some other arbitrary weird stuff is.
(To avoid confusion, I personally love the arbitrary weird stuff.)
The world knows this is art but some bullshit artists, pun intended, in New York pretend like it is not. Then other bullshit artists in other cities follow what the bullshit artists in New York are doing because most aren't creative or free thinkers at all.
I love galleries personally but it is a class of non-creative, closed minded, bullshit artists at this point.
Also because those bullshit artists are aware the big money is in this bullshit world, so they give their best to get in and profit. You certainly don't get rich drawing for Bethesda, while in the art gallery business you maybe maybe maybe could.
The thing about technical skills in drawing today is that you can learn them. Artists do know how to draw hyper realistically and if you have good fine motor skills, you can systematically learn it. End result is like a photography tho and it all costs a lot of time.
Meaning, whereas in the past, if you was the first one to figure out, say, perspective or some color, you was able to draw what others could not. You did something knew and you are remembered for it. Today, if you can draw super realistic portrait, you are one of many talented artists who learned that from a books and classes.
> As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other forms of art?
No one knows artists behind video games. I do not thing realism is the distinguishing things behind artists who do video games, movies or tv. It is more of scene design, lightning, camera work etc that gets to be judged from the art side.
Artist here. Artists are indeed less skilled today, but there is an effort to improve the situation (ARC). Google 'twilight of painting'.
Concept artists are highly skilled, but they do something different than the painters of yore. They turn around decent looking stuff in a few hours. It's very impressive, but it (naturally) lacks the depth & thoughtfulness achieved by painters like Caillebotte.
I think that there is something else happening. We as a society don't really recognize industrial design. Some Youtube channels like 'Technology Connections' does.
Perhaps in the future we'll spend more time recognizing the mastery of craft that industrial designers put into creating household lamps and such. Especially since the history is pilling up and ready to be mined for interesting content.
Fun fact: Michelangelo was hired after a heavy snow storm in 1494 to build snow sculptures around the city of Florence — just before the Medici were exiled.
It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of a rivalry, for example:
https://artrkl.com/blogs/news/art-history-feuds-michelangelo...
https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-mic...
You can't really imagine this happening between top contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that wouldn't make much sense.