I think that there's a difference between art today and art a hundred and fifty years ago and I think that it's deeper than you suspect. In the Middle Ages, sch

I think that there's a difference between art today and art a hundred and fifty years ago and I think that it's deeper than you suspect. In the Middle Ages, scholars believed that beauty was representational. They believed that something was beautiful exactly to the degree it represented (religious) truth. The more one depicted virtue in art, the more beautiful that art was, and effective representation was just one aspect of that virtue. The purpose of art was to make this virtue more accessible to the common people. Fast forward to the beginnings of modern art and what we have is people like Monet and Van Gogh who demonstrate that aesthetics are necessarily tied to photo-realism. This leads to an eventual explosion is aesthetic experimentation, much of who's purpose was not any expression of the 'truth' but rather experimentation for experimentation's sake. As time goes on, the art community develops a tight feedback loop which ultimately leaves behind the idea of clarity in favor of novelty and ultimately forgets about accessibility which used to be one of arts most important attributes. Art as experimentation isn't a bad thing, but it's an attitude that is radically different from that only a century and a half ago. People of a conservative bent often miss the old attitude and you'll notice that when the Right-Wing governments of the 30's took over, the first thing they did was resurrect it. (Ironically, the Soviet Union also did this.)