Of course, holding up a mirror to society might be an extremely political thing.

I don't know where else there's left to go other than to say back to it's roots in beauty one could hope.

You literally got a video of some girl making herself throw up on a constant loop. Things like an empty white room with the lights being turned on and off. And of course, what started it all, DuChamp's urinal.

I imagine before it becomes so ridiculous that even the outside observer with no interest in art can look at it and be like.. no, this isn't anything. We'll have scenes of literal excrement (which has basically already been done, see "Artist's Shit", though you can't blame the artist for turning 90 cans of something you normally pay people to get rid of into $300,000+ EACH, can you?) on a sidewalk, something as mundane and lacking substance as a blurred selfie photo (that's going to be my idea, nobody steal it.), etc.

Pretty sure I posted this here but for anyone who hasn't seen it and is interested in art it's definitely worth the watch.

Ironic thing is certain forms of the most simple, mundane images of art have (allegedly) incredible philosophical value depending on the observer. Example.

A pile of excrement on a city sidewalk. You could call it a savage commentary of the uncaring nature of modern day life and how far we've come, or how far we've fallen. It reminds us not only of social ills but of innovation and progress, the sidewalk, social services, etc.

A blurry selfie photo. A quiet commentary on the bustling nature of modern day society, how "rushed" we've become in a hurry to get to the next place or do the next thing we can't even live in the moment anymore. A tragedy or a blessing. Truly up to the beholder.

An unkempt bed sheet with ejaculate on it. A jarring commentary on the loss of cadence in- and formerly sacred nature of- love and romance. How values have fallen with such myopia toward pleasure chasing and away from matters of the heart, home, and family.

--

Who knows maybe we could all become one of the best, most respected artists of our day by just being lazy and disgusting with no artistic skill whatsoever. Who'd have thunk it.

Just imagine. The fact I'm not wrong. I could get up one morning, get drunk, take a dump outside at the corner, take a bad selfie, defile my bed, take pictures of it all, and end up a multi-millionaire world famous artist in no time at all. The fact that this process as I described is actually possible is quite disturbing. I look at it like urban music. Trying to maintain and restore values and virtue gets you ignored, in debt, and perhaps a slap or much worse. Helping to aid the degradation and destruction of the very values that brought us to where we are today, gets you fame and fortune. That's what the arts and media have become. Curious, to say the least.

Every artist’s job is to transfigure a genuine experience into a cultural good. The artist will not intellectually process the experience to reach its comprehension at the universality level; he will record it in the most eminently communicable way possible. Of course sometimes it’s not that easily communicated. Sometimes it can be so subtle that, no matter how hard he tries to be clear, it won’t be very clear — you’ll have to crack your head a little to know what he’s talking about. Not to mention the fact that to understand his experience, you will need to have sufficient maturity or imagination — if not, you will understand nothing.

It is also possible for the artist, in addition to fueling cultural memory with his art, making it a vehicle of intelligence and transforming art into a concept. He can do that, although he is not obligated. There are artists who worked with a very clear intellectual awareness of what they were doing, such as Henry James, who wrote an explanatory preface for each of his novel. Sometimes the preface was even better than the book. Others would not even be able to explain how they did the book, because their job is not to explain, but to do. Once done, that genuine, true experience is recorded. Hence you can easily distinguish what is genuine experience from mere copied experience, stereotype repetition (which is a thing that has little memory content and is just word repetition).

The artist’s job is to make these experiences available to other human beings. He can go on meditating and deepening it if he wants to, but it is not required for him to do so. Not everyone can be all things.

I agree with your view of the artist as being one of enabling the audience to be able to access certain experiences. I think most great novelists and music artists do provide gateways into alternate realities and it is their perception which is central to their greatness.

Art, to me, is a luxury in the sense it comes after, much after, the basic form has been attained. For instance, look at the evolution of vehicles. The first cars were simple in design and the fact that they worked, i.e. we could drive around, was all that mattered. As time flew by, we perfected the functional aspects of cars - we no longer needed to worry as much about whether cars would start, move, stop as desired - and that point in the history of cars marked the beginning of art's involvement in the car industry. Cars from then on needed to be aesthetically pleasing too - dazzling colors and artistic form (interior and exterior) were necessary to ensure customer appeal. I guess this answers the question, "where did art begin?" Not exactly what the OP was looking for.

Anyway, "where is art going?"

Take a moment to consider what, to us, is grotesque? I gave it some thought and the first thing to cross my mind was evil. Of course we have the "beautiful" painting of Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian depicting rape and countless, again "beautiful", works of Jesus' crucifixion about what is essentially torture and killing but, all paintings with evil as a theme evoke, if one gives adequate attention to what's being conveyed, disgust/revulsion and that's as antithetical to pleasing as one can get. Evil can't be made into an art and if it is, it'll contradict the essence of art viz. beauty for evil is inherently grotesque.

It must be then that if art is given the opportunity, it'll reduce/eliminate evil (the mother of all that's grotesque) for its raison d'etre is to beautify. Paradise for theists/Utopia for non-theists (places where evil is nonexistent) - that's where art is going.

Take a moment to consider what, to us, is grotesque?

Umberto Eco has a great art book on this called "On Ugliness." It's a discussion on the aesthetics of ugliness that is set up semi-chronilogically, and topically. You have monsters in antiquity, passions and torture, the uncanny, Satan and the Satan adjacent.

Aside from the actual narrative it has tons of quality reproductions of art from across the ages of all things evil and ugly, and a ton of excerpts from "horror" work across the ages. Functional tests like witch hunters guides to modern horror to Shakespeare. It's a favorite coffee table book of mine.

I guess the take away would be that, while the philosophy of aesthetics has generally focused on what is beautiful, and defined ugliness and evil in relation to that, art also serves a purpose is defining and exploring evil.

Trend wise, Greek sculpture and Medieval art has lots of dark undertones and horror that aren't always placed in the context of a "good." Subject matter in general seems to get a LOT cheerier after the Baroque period. The impressionists for instance, tend to have bright scenes, while romantic art has these gorgeous land scapes. I might be generalizing, but a trip through art museums chronologicaly always seems to get gradually happier for me.

This changes when you hit contemporary art. A lot of photography I've seen lately has very dark subject matter. War, racial injustice, poverty. A return to ugliness.


--

Unrelated, I think stylistically art is going to become more interactive and exploritory. With Sleep No More and Then She Fell in NYC, you have the transformation of a typical play into a haunted house type scenerio where each audience member sees different scenes as events play out across a large building simultaneously. The audience also gets brought into the performance. VR art (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has some up right now) is a promising direction, allowing exploration into a scene.

Unrelated, I think stylistically art is going to become more interactive and exploritory. With Sleep No More and Then She Fell in NYC, you have the transformation of a typical play into a haunted house type scenerio where each audience member sees different scenes as events play out across a large building simultaneously. The audience also gets brought into the performance. VR art (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has some up right now) is a promising direction, allowing exploration into a scene. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with this in principle. I think we will start to see some very radical experimentation with visual effects in the medium of time. In ancient times stories, plays, and poems were the main form of temporally extended art. Then music took the center stage for temporal expression, with melodies, harmonies, chords etc.. Now, in modern times we have untapped technology as the potential for all sorts of temporally extended visual displays. Until now, the field has been mostly confined to moving pictures, movies, which are basically recorded stories or plays, though special effects paly an important role in movies. But that's where the industry has led the artists, to the movies. In reality though, movies as an art form are very basic, and the technology which exists right now provides so much potential for artistic expression using temporal visual effects, it's time for the artists to lead the industry. The visual changes within the temporal medium can be so much more rapid and dramatic than the changes found in music, as demonstrated by the simple strobe light.

I don't know where else there is to go but up (or back) from here lol.

At the same time the artist and his message does interest me. He seems to be trying to prove a point, one I'm not sure he himself even understands fully but nonetheless it does capture the mind and touch on philosophy.