No; Jan van Eyck painted the way he did in large part because that is what he was expected to do; 'Art', for him, in his time, had a fairly specific definition.

No; Jan van Eyck painted the way he did in large part because that is what he was expected to do; 'Art', for him, in his time, had a fairly specific definition. It is the lack of such a definition that makes postmodernism. If someone painted like Jan van Eyck today, it would be postmodern --- both because of the year, and because of the current culture of art. Same painting, different classification. (There's a hilarious story by Borges with almost exactly this premise: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote") Please understand refraining from saying whether this freedom is good or bad. I mean only to name a distinction between western art up through modernism -- art which met specific expectations according to period and place --- and western art post-modernism, which defies any uniform expectation.