> “could the masses still be convinced his art is good in modern times?“
Is your actual question directed towards the quality of the art, or towards the ability of the masses to recognize it? Maybe it’s because I used to paint a bit, but man, Picasso was amazing. If you actually know a random grade schooler who “comes up” with this, hook me up!
ART is not about about aesthetical appeal or about realism. Art is about art, and what makes an artist just that is the ability to translate his perception into something. Look at the way the style of the self-portraits changed… you can look into his soul.
No one, and I mean no one, is driven towards art because they want the masses to be pleased about their artwork (if anything, the opposite is the case, but it’s not about that). Expression needs no public appeal.
Will what Picasso expressed still be accessible to humans removed from our contemporary culture? Yes. For the masses? Not in the chaotic absence of culture that dominates our time.
That is a very modernist way of looking at it. I think art ceases to become art when it is self-referential. Art is truth, and great art can stand alone, divorced from context.
> is driven towards art because they want the masses to be pleased about their artwork
Agreed, artists are self-driven.
> Will what Picasso expressed still be accessible to humans removed from our contemporary culture? Yes. For the masses? Not in the chaotic absence of culture that dominates our time.
Artists like Picasso could only become so influential because the art buying elites were hellbent on rejecting the existing bourgeois order. This included a distaste for conformity, which turned into an obsession with originality. I genuinely doubt that humans removed from our contemporary culture will look in awe at art produced in such an incestuous context, rather, more they will pity the conditions in which such art thrived. Or just ignore it.
Wikipedia seems to be claiming they called her "petite Picasso," but I remember her being called "pocket Picasso." It was a while ago and possible my memory is bad. She went to middle school across the street from my high school and was friends with a freshman in my class when I was a senior, so I got to meet her and work with her a bit.
I guess it's an open question whether she would have been as popular and successful if not for the original Picasso already existing. There is always an element of luck in who gets discovered. It's not like she was the only uniquely talented person I ever met in all the years I dabbled in art. But people seem to consistently underestimate what this takes. It's not like you just wake up every day with no training or practice, inspiration strikes, and 20 minutes later you have a cubist masterpiece, and you can repeat that every day. This girl was legitimately special.
This reminds me of Salvador Dali's quip that "the first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
It also reminds me of Marcel Duchamp, who (speaking of his tremendously famous and influential Nude Descending A Staircase[1]) said "This idea of changing, not repeating myself. I could have done ten nudes probably at that time if I wanted to. I decided not to go that."[2]
Is your actual question directed towards the quality of the art, or towards the ability of the masses to recognize it? Maybe it’s because I used to paint a bit, but man, Picasso was amazing. If you actually know a random grade schooler who “comes up” with this, hook me up!
ART is not about about aesthetical appeal or about realism. Art is about art, and what makes an artist just that is the ability to translate his perception into something. Look at the way the style of the self-portraits changed… you can look into his soul.
No one, and I mean no one, is driven towards art because they want the masses to be pleased about their artwork (if anything, the opposite is the case, but it’s not about that). Expression needs no public appeal.
Will what Picasso expressed still be accessible to humans removed from our contemporary culture? Yes. For the masses? Not in the chaotic absence of culture that dominates our time.