Also, that painting you linked to as being "powerful" was painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He painted in the style of Italian Renaissance painters, though he's French and lived in the mid-1800's. I guess that's cultural appropriation. He also married one of his students, which of course is a big no-no nowadays, since he was a man in power over her. Looks like you can't like this painting any more now.
You see how dumb it is to apply 2019 political correctness to past history?
It sounds like you think the painting's age means that it no longer has power, or at least, not power enough to warrant a content-warning. I would beg to differ, and argue that the fact that it still has the power to shock is what makes it "world-renowned".
But you do know that the original one is the one in Louvre and saw a least a detailed photo of it, maybe even the real thing. Racist, misogynist or whatever, the art in its original form is still there.
When the books are censored the opposite happens. The original in the people's mind changes and the original nuances of the art is lost. Moreover we lose our understanding of progress. The change of the worldview and the values is an important part of understanding art.
If we would like to show the progress we made and our current values, we should create our own classics for generations to read and understand us, rather than muddying the water between us and the previous generations.
I understand why (historically), but it is still one of those things that cannot be unseen once you see them - there are no women in those paintings/photos. It really boggles the mind of a modern human.
Art and literature of all kinds has a long, long history of portraying people from the past in historically inaccurate ways that the people doing the portrayal take for granted.
One obvious religious example would be the many paintings of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing contemporary (for the time of the painting) European clothing.
I wonder how people would feel if somebody made a huge painting with some modern brightly colorful composition and a cutout rectangle in it and the Louvre Museum put the Mona Lisa in the cutout rectangle to symbolize the abandon of old canons for the new.
...First the Mona Lisa's beauty would be diluted then its meaning - the art in it - would be destroyed (not irreparably, you could always take the Mona Lisa out again and put it where it deserves to be - on its own, in the context it deserves).
I love the fearless girl. But the Charging Bull shows the energy of progress, of the economy, of ambition, of growth. Not something I would want anyone to stop.
The advance of the bull's charge means we are all better off, means our children will be better off than we are. It means progress.
...If anything the girl should be riding the bull, pointing her finger forward! Yes a little girl can ride and drive the progress, can lead the charge of progress!
...but she should not be there to stop it.
They could have bought an old nazi tank and put her in front of it, and the Fearless Girl would have had exactly the same meaning.
Let the Fearless Girl tell her message.
Let the Charging Bull tell its message
Oh sure. Nobody's telling you personally not to like it or discounting the reasons you like it. We're just talking about the thermodynamic limit of the likingness of it over a spherical cow average of humans ;) And maybe also asserting that there are many other lesser known paintings that also have those qualities that you enjoy but you haven't seen because they weren't slingshotted into the public conciousness. These things are linked but not necessarily causitive. My claim above is even simpler, which is that I'm surprised people are spending time sussing out what specific paint was used because I didn't think that was even a question people asked. It's a painting from a known artist with a known style and known materials that both it and its sibling paintings have been pretty well pored over before.
Consider the time period and the historical context. It's modern times, Cold War is occurring, and WW1 and WW2 left scars across Western Europe and caused major changes in the art world, including being a boon to abstraction and fragmenting styles into many eclectic directions.
Chemistry has DRASTICALLY altered painting from the Renaissance to the World War era. New pigments have been constantly highlighted and displayed in artwork. Finally, an insanely blue blue has been invented, bluer than any other blue paint in the past.
The artist highlighted above attempts to showcase the new technology in its purest form. Though, despite this strive for purity of blue, the application is inherently uneven. If you look into the painted canvas up close, you will see imperfections and patterns in "just a wall". It's also a statement, it may cause reactions and cause viewers to question the boundary between art and not-art.
It's not my cup of tea compared to masterworks of Van Gogh or Homer or any of the legendary painters, but art goes through many phases and is used to express many different ideas. What I do think is bonkers is that modern artists (who are well-connected) may be paid millions of dollars for these works, which to me don't showcase skill and talent, but which reward creative ideation and concepts.
You completely ignored everything I said. Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.
It's amazing you can point to the Renaissance as an obvious point in history where things transitioned but you aren't able to see it happening right now around us.
The original you see today isn’t the original that would have been seen immediately after it was painted.
Mona Lisa is pretty crap anyway, if you ever find yourself in the Louvre, look at what’s hung on the opposite wall. Now that is an impressive painting.
There are clear differences between the painting and the photo, multiple things were added and removed. You might not place much value in them, but that's purely subjective. I must place more importance on those changes than you do because I have a preference for the photo over the painting. Objectively, those changes do exist regardless of how we feel about them.
This reads like a wildly confident statement about art.
While at the same time not mentioning the actual name of "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" (Leonardo Da Vinci), nor knowing that the name of his master is very well known, and even the influence of artists that he seemed to despise (eg Michaelangelo) are very well documented as well.
Maaybe this narrow view of (art) history needs to be fine-tuned on more data :-)
Conservatism is one thing, but these guys weren't even in the same generation and both died more than a century ago. Nothing stands still, least of all art. I suspect that over 130 years, many people have disagreed that your "only reason" is "degrading", and many more found other reasons to appreciate these artists as well.
You see how dumb it is to apply 2019 political correctness to past history?
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