A commenter wrote (about my landscape painting):
What a prole choice of subject.
A bobo would paint abstract. Or better yet, just leave the canvas blank. It’s called postmodernism.
There are many commenters who seem to live for the opportunity to insult me. Unfortunately, in this case, the comment is not completely without truth. For more than a hundred years, paintings that are pretty and look like a scene from real life have been out of favor with the intellectual elites, and that has spilled over to all other elites sometime during the twentieth century.
The theory behind elite tastes in art is that any art that a regular everyday person, not educated in elite art appreciation, would like to look at is not considered to be worthy art. The elite art movement started out as a Marxist anti-bourgeoisie movement, although today it’s the bourgeoisie themselves who are spending huge amounts of money to buy art that the regular everyday person would consider to be crap. (Another example of how the different types of elites have joined together into a broad elite class.)
So why bother to paint landscapes if they will never be appreciated by the elites of the art world?
Perhaps the reason is that I see through the elite art scam and maybe I don’t want participate in it. Or perhaps I just see more opportunity in more traditional art. Contemporary abstract art is generally worthless junk unless it is somehow discovered by someone powerful enough in the art world to promote it. The vast majority of artists trying to make it in that world just have a lot of paintings or other works of “art” that are really nothing but worthless crap that people wouldn’t want to hang on their walls even if it was given away for free.
On the other hand, well-executed representational art has greater intrinsic value because there are so few artists in the developed world who can actually do it well. How to paint in a representational manner is no longer taught at art schools. And despite the propaganda from intellectual elites, there are still many rich people who want paintings in their homes that they actually like to look at, and thus you will always find galleries that sell this type of art, although such galleries aren’t found in Chelsea. However, one will never become a multi-centimillionaire like Damien Hirst from doing landscape paintings. Thomas Kinkade, the most economically successful representational artist of our time (and much hated by the elites because his paintings were very much on the prole end of landscape art), was only worth $66 million when he died, which is a much lower net worth than the wealthiest abstract artists favored by the elites.
In my defense, the style of painting that I am trying to develop, plein-air-style landscapes, is the least prole form of representational art.
