All human expression reflects someone’s intention, for someone’s benefit. Those variables have shifted considerably over time. Medieval art in Europe was predominantly religious, reflecting and affirming universal beliefs and the ruling class through visual propaganda. Private art and decoration could take up secular themes, which also served to affirm the wealth, education, and spiritual bona fides of the owner. Art expressed the interests and values of Church and nobility. Public monuments emerged as a form of political propaganda, to legitimize power. The new, more fluid mercantile society aped these accoutrements of wealth and religious standing in a bid for their own legitimacy. Public squares in Europe are repositories of social history, sporting monuments to “great heroes”—often erected by themselves or by those who thought to gain something in their shadow. European parks are now public places, but still adorned with goo-gaa from past aristocracy, such Baroque fountains with statues of irrelevant mythological figures.
When underlying power structures dissolved, and secularizing and democratizing forces took over, art was bereft of its traditional meanings. With the loss of the Church as patron, art turned to the marketplace. Kitsch versions of an aristocratic esthetic arose, especially with technologies of mass reproduction. Except under authoritarian regimes, public art could no longer express a singular dominant point of view, but was driven to a vacuous common denominator to offend no one, expressing little at all. For that reason, abstraction reigned.
Even in the New World, culture still apes the general outlines of its European progenitors. We still have plazas and parks that invite public sculpture competitions for the most innocuous design. Art museums continue to provide the semblance of an ongoing art tradition. Galleries need to sell something and artisans still need to make a living. The public still seeks to fill up empty wall space, if not empty lives. Outward forms carry on, marching to moderately different tunes.
The breakdown of tradition is hardly lamentable when put in context. Is it a misfortune that art has lost direction and substance, when its earlier functions were arguably nefarious or political? It might be historically true that the great artistic skills of the Renaissance would never have developed outside theology, empire, greed, status, personal vanity, and clannish rivalries. Should those ever have been the basis of art in the first place? If art seems to have lost its way, perhaps it had never properly found one. Perhaps the meaning and potential of art still remains to be discovered.
Such a possibility can only be conceived in hindsight. In step with society’s painful democratization, democratizing art freed it of bonds that once gave it meaning. The skills that produced the exquisite portraiture and aristocratic furniture of a bygone era could only exist in the first place because of the wage scale of the time. Since we are now again approaching a similar social disparity, perhaps the stage is set for a new sort of Renaissance? I strain to imagine the values and intentions, let alone the imagery, that would inspire such art, if indeed it will merit the name.