/lit/ - Literature

Ok, some references for you:

Ways of Seeing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-pUm3eI

The Shock of the New
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZsQl6L9WCI

Great website:
http://butdoesitfloat.com/

>blame the education of laymen for this. suddenly we have people who used to be illiterate half-starving proletariat becoming fat plebeians, and now they all think because they can read a bit, or know what art is they most partake in these wonders, despite being talentless dipshits.
You're blaming the wrong things. What happened is that artistic production (in the sense of """high art""", the one that innovates, that gives us new thoughts) went one way, while mass media went to the complete opposite.

Photography changed the role of painting in the 19th century and so art lost it's function of registering the world as we see it. That made the painters escape from the figurative and explore other things such as the media they used, the concepts behind the work, dreams, feelings, material, structure, anyway, they were questioning what they were doing all along. Impressionism, surrealism, dada, cubism, abstractionism, expressionism (figurative and abstract), all-over, it all derives from that and that image you posted too.

At the same time, communication media, tv, advertising, comic books, films, better printing processes and so on, made this production go to the opposite route. They are more figurative, more explanatory, more about design, more "pixelated" in the sense that all that matters is what we see, instead of the action or the thinking. People are educated by this.