I noticed that as images of van Gogh's "Starry Night" kept cropping up recently in various unrelated media. All of them looked like paint-by-number pictures. Th

I noticed that as images of van Gogh's "Starry Night" kept cropping up recently in various unrelated media. All of them looked like paint-by-number pictures. The original has impasto brushtrokes and bold streaks of barely-mixed colour everywhere and you can spend hours finding joy in the implied detail and the movement and the expressiveness. The online versions inspire you as much as a single panel in a comic strip. Internet scans do to visual art what mp3s and earbuds did to good music. The arts have morphed to fit the new media but the technology has caused a loss of ability to appreciate for what came before.