#if youre educated in a western tradition youre sort of encouraged to idolize realism and its associated artistic skills | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

deepseacityunderground · 4 months

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ive said this before but so much of what Retvrn Freaks glorify in early modern european art are just components inherent to the mediums being used at the time as opposed to like. an example of heightened skill that has been supposedly Lost in these degenerate times.... oil paint just looks like that. its very tonal and rich and even an artist with mediocre rendering skills will have their rendering skills improved by painting in oil. old oil paintings took years to complete not because the artists doing them were very skilled but because oil takes months to dry and they built up subtle washes over dried paint. tracing was also commonly utilized during that time period, and artists also often had small armies of apprentices who would do the hard work for them with no credit. these huge highly tonal oil paintings become significantly less impressive when you actually learn about their context.

#this isnt to like. diss or hate on oil painters or even all art made in europe during that time period #there are lots of great artists from that time period #but i also dont think that sort of art is more valuable than any other artistic movement #and i think posing these two very culturally european mediums as like the Pinnacle of art is stupid #another issue which isnt really to do with what im talking about here is like cultural ideals surrounding art...#if youre educated in a western tradition youre sort of encouraged to idolize realism and its associated artistic skills #eg: (anatomical accuracy - rendering skills - perspective)#and then favor mediums which lend better to those ideals. and then when you look at art from other cultural traditions #where the focus may have been on something different like color or symbol or narrative over realism you sort of see them as “lesser”#or theres the assumption that the artists who made those pieces were worse at art or unable to make highly realistic pieces #which is of course nonsense and also often racist (eg. colonizers in west africa assuming there must have been a greek colony #there because they found realistic statues and couldnt understand how people who currently made more stylized art could have made them)#but you even see this in popular assumption about european art pre-enlightenment too #like all those memes making fun of medieval manuscript faces. they drew like that because the narrative was more important than the realism #because the artists drawing them were basically illustrating bible stories #medium at hand also has a big hand to play here. art made for woodcut is gonna look different to art made for fabric #and oil paints arent uniquely european but they arent as widespread as clay or textile

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