I can't read that article, but as an addendum (or possible summary): Western European art pretty much had naturalistic and romantic representationlism down by t

I can't read that article, but as an addendum (or possible summary): Western European art pretty much had naturalistic and romantic representationlism down by the mid 19th century, but this turned out to be a poor platform for expression (and outmoded somewhat by the invention and apparent advancement of photographic techniques). There was a lot of experimentation with subject matter (common people al a Tanner's Young Sabot Maker, early futurism [and, interestingly, post-apocalyptic ideation with Hubert Roberts paintings of ruins e.g. the Louvre]), framing (a contemporary of Monet's whose name escapes me but whose paintings are highly reminiscent of the composition of cell phone photography), etc., but the drift toward non-representationalism didn't really start until Monet and (and, to a lesser extent, Van Gogh) got his hands on some ukiyo-e prints. Likewise, several waves of negrophilia (and the accompanying vernacular art) sweeping Europe inspired Picasso and Man Ray, among others. That's my undergrad-with-16-credit-hours-of-vaguely-remembered-art-history speaking, though; I could be off. Still, this speaks to me od the importance of - wait for it - diversity, in a rather concrete manner. The Western tradition of artistic practice was simply unable to see and experiment meaningfully with non-representational construction before being exposed to entirely foreign traditions. If you think of how much of contemporary design relies on modernist bases, it's scary to think how much we might be missing out on with, say, the contraction of XR work largely to engineering.