The history of art and its functions or: What the image algorithm does not recognize, it does not eat

On Friday, I spoke to a very good friend about her plan to put together a comprehensive tour for her parents-in-law on the occasion of this year's Kunsttage (Basel Art Days). This would be challenging in that both family members are interested in culture, but are generally somewhat sceptical about contemporary, conceptual or even abstract art in general. It was therefore necessary to propose a rather conservative programme whose works were oriented towards the viewing habits of an mature audience. Shortly afterwards, I found myself at the enchanting vernissage ‘The Mother Position’ at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in Totengässlein and was amazed to see almost exclusively figurative, albeit distorted, aestheticised paintings. Many of the works on display, which were obviously selected with great emphasis on technical excellence, referenced classics of art history such as Titian, Picasso or Cézanne, and the cover of the catalogue booklet featured a painting by Berthe Morisot from 1880. With all this, I couldn't help but wonder why the - in view of the latest technical achievements actually obsolete - art form of painting that depicts objects, people and animals, still sells best? Why is the representation of objects and living beings on a flat image carrier still accorded such a superior value in the general public and in discourse that is removed from art spaces, colleges and universities?

My research led me to what are undoubtedly the two most representative and relevant sources of information in scientific research: On the one hand, vomit emojis and hateful comments under Instagram videos, and on the other, Latin and ancient Greek scribblings by old white men who have been dead for centuries (yay diversity!). The former can be found under almost all viral videos of abstract painting, performance art and other art forms that are not immediately accessible like Renaissance painting. Statements such as ‘My three year old could do that’, ‘that's the normal braindead Biden voter who has never worked a day in his life’ and one of my favourites ‘fuck all of you in Woke-istan’ are often combined with rhetorical questions such as ‘when did art stop being good?!’.

This question leads directly to my second category, and thus to the more demure predecessors of the annoyed online haters. The Greek writer Duris of Samos from the fourth century BC is considered to be one of the first to make a supposedly objective statement on the qualitative progress of art. If we follow his comments - handed down by later authors such as Cicero - we realise that he praises above all successful imitation of nature. In other words, the more a statue looks as if it were a formerly living person petrified by Medusa, and the less it looks like a hieroglyphic symbol unwound from an obelisk, the more successful the ancient Greek found it.

We find similar theses, some would say carbon-copied ones, almost 2000 years later in the main contribution to art history by the Florentine artist and art biographer Giorgio Vasari, who still today is indispensable for the formation of a “canon”. In the biographies of the best artists, sculptors and architects from 1550 and 1568, Vasari describes in a kind of step-by-step model how art reached its absolute peak under Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and, above all, Michelangelo. This was because the painted and drawn figures of the legendary triad were full of grace and beauty, the artists had perfected perspective and the depiction of light, and their artefacts were perceived as more alive than nature itself.

For a long time, this judgement was misunderstood as lusting for an almost Darwinian competition for mimetic ,i.e. nature-imitating, perfection for its own sake. The old white men (excuse the renewed cliché) of 19th century art history revelled in cockfighting; it looked like over centuries, only immaculate physical craftsmanship have always distinguished the best of the best. It took many years to move away from this: in the 1960s, Professor Svetlana Alpers emphasised that the imitation of nature so beloved by Vasari also had to be understood intellectually and conceptually.

The pragmatic aim was to present the figures in a way that was understandable and familiar to the public. If the often almost illiterate viewers are shown Mary as a naturalistic person who cries because her son has been killed, they ideally also understand better why other sons should perhaps not be killed. Or, unfortunately, the other way round: they finally understand why they now have to wage war, retake Muslim Constantinople or clear the Jewish ghettos and why it is right to slaughter everyone who is not also sad that the innocent son of their own god was killed. (Any reminiscences or parallels to the year 2024 can be drawn by each reader individually).

How does all this help us with the initial question of why photorealistic portraits are generally less hated on the internet than abstract colour field paintings? One possibility would be that when faced with new phenomena, new experiences, people perhaps always look first at what is decipherable, understandable and familiar. Interestingly, the small catalogue of the above-mentioned exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts on the pictures of mothers and children also makes this point. The curator Isabelle Graw uses psychoanalysis to explain all the things we feel when we think about our mothers; whether they are/were loving, angry, present, deceased, etc. We search for understandable, even if perhaps only subconsciously familiar feelings. According to the curator, these emotions, that are stored deep within us, this love, fear, anger, ambivalence, now come to light in the paintings of mothers, supported by bold colours, materials, forms, in order to intensify their effect and to make these memories, which cannot be directly depicted, abstract - an innovation compared to Vasari's understanding of art.

To understand why we somehow still feel sooo much when we look at figurative painting, we simply have to look very closely; at the works, but above all we have to look within ourselves.