Painting is Dead

Or at least, this is the claim made every few years by art critics and historians who've run out of things to say.

In the "old days", (to use a quaint term), there was generally one accepted style or genre of art being done, which is what we know about today -- we really have no way of knowing what else was done, because history is "written by the winners", as they say. For years, art historians (wrongly) assumed that women were never artists, because they were so rarely given the opportunity and much of their work was attributed to men. It didn't mean women artists didn't exist, it just means they weren't cared about enough to be catalogued & archived.

I was very fortunate to once have the opportunity to visit a small room underneath the Medici Chapel that had only recently been discovered. It was not open to the public, only scholars, but since I was studying in Italy I was allowed to visit with my professor. The theory was that this room was where Michaelangelo hid from the Pope, and the walls were covered with the most magnificent drawings, which definitely looked to be done by Michaelangelo's hand. But there were other drawings on the walls, too, that seemed so modern & wild that they could have been done by Picasso, yet with the same marks, the same weight to the line as the other drawings. Upon testing the pigments, it had been found that they were the same age, and had been put down at around the same time. Art historians are still arguing about whether this work was done by Michaelangelo or some random workman, but there is no argument to the fact that the two styles existed, side-by-side, at the same time.

One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the acceptance of a plurality of styles, which is what I think makes the times we live in so exciting. That's why I never understand the people who say "xyz is the one true art form" or some such hogwash -- there is no "one true art form" now, and in reality there probably never was.

That's the problem with people making essentialist statements -- it's impossible to declare them true.