> Here’s a well-worn and simplistic reason: the crisis of representation happened. The crisis of representation arose from advances in photography that made traditional types of art like portraiture and landscape seem superfluous. With cameras becoming cheap and ubiquitous, why spend endless hours on achieving photorealistic effects in visual arts, given that photographs would always be more true to life?<p>This is a painting (print, but let's not be pedantic): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%E5%86%A8%E5%B6%BD%E4%B8%89%E5%8D%81%E5%85%AD%E6%99%AF_%E7%9B%B8%E5%B7%9E%E4%B8%83%E9%87%8C%E6%B5%9C-Shichirigahama_in_Sagami_Province_(S%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB_Shichirigahama),_from_the_series_Thirty-six_Views_of_Mount_Fuji_(Fugaku_sanj%C5%ABrokkei)_MET_DP140979.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%E5%86%A8%E5%B6%BD%E4%B8%...</a><p>So is this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_(1825-1905)_-_The_Day_of_the_Dead_(1859).jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William-Adolphe_Bouguerea...</a><p>And this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AA78_by_Zdzislaw_Beksinski_1978.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AA78_by_Zdzislaw_Beksinsk...</a><p>This is a photograph: <a href="https://www.naturalhealth365.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/coffee-shop.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.naturalhealth365.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/...</a><p>It is perfectly realistic, technically flawless, and what artists (such as the first three examples) were striving towards before photography, right?<p>Wait, ooops, the 3rd example is from well after the invention of photography. Well, no matter - works such as that are common in modern art, right? It's not that modern art is extremely narrow in what it permits, and anything remotely beautiful, even if it is a grotesque beauty such as of Beksiński or Giger, is vanishingly rare?<p>> I wonder if he’s considered the other side of the coin: the better that AI gets at creating artwork that perfectly represents visual reality, the more valuable art that instead fixates on the depiction of human interiority will become.<p>This assumes that anything resembling "visual reality" cannot also represent or evoke "human interiority". As if those scenes of landscapes or people have nothing to say, no feelings to evoke, only cold reflections of geography and anatomy.<p>> This is the Chinese finger trap our artistic populist overlords can’t get out of: the more they disdain the idea of an artistic vanguard that stretches the boundaries of what is possible in art, the more that spirit of experimentalism is reinvigorated.<p>I eagerly await what new wonders this vanguard will bring. An upturned bidet? A pineapple taped to a wall? Canned poop? No, wait, that's been done.. canned some-other-biological-waste then. Whatever it is, it's sure to shock me to my core, and make me re-examine my assumptions about what makes art 'art', or perhaps, even, what makes us human?<p>To answer the title of the post, I am not "shocked" by non-representational art (or rather modern art, since some of it <i>is</i> representational, just deliberately.. well, "ugly" seems to be the closest description). I don't think anyone is. I am tired and bored of it. We've seen it, we get it, you're making some kind of statement about the boundaries of what is and isn't art, very brave, very clever. Or it was, the first ten times. But we're far past a thousand times, and now it's the norm, not the exception, abusing the subjectivity of what makes art good* to overstay its welcome.<p>*Notice how they try to box their opponents into the technical-skill-makes-art-good position? Unless we can provide a nearly mathematical formula to objectively evaluate art, then by default their preferences for dull, ugly abstraction shall prevail.