The Age of Art as we know it

In Philosophy of Science we the beginning of modern physics is generally dated by the work of Newton. There were profound changes in how physics was done during this time (late 17th century to early 18th century). Physics as we know it started somewhere between the early 1600s and 1700s.

Now certainly the scientists (natural philosophers) did work in these fields before this time, in fact back to the beginning of our human writings about the world. But reading the works of Kepler andDescartes is very different from reading Newton. There is no one day that it happened, one can see the progress in Kepler and Gallileo and Mersenne and Gassendi, but somewhere in there the ideas shifted, Newton mastered them and explicated them, and the world of physics followed suite. By about 2 generations after Newton the battles were all but over.

I see a similar beginning to art, around the time of the Enlightement and the old masters of Italy. Sure, there was work done before then that shares many of the same physical properties of art ... but the relational properties: of artist-to-art, artist-to-society, art-object-to-society and the like, these changed drastically during this time. It was the beginning of art as we know it.

Both art and physics also went through transformations in the early 20th century. With revolution of physical relativism (Einstein's theories), the way we think about science, the fact that we think about scientific truths within a framework, that was a huge change ... though the science of today still "looks like" the science of the late 19th century.

Art had a revolution too, and related. Art also became aware of its frameworking ... of the media itself of which the art objects were made.

In both cases the old form did not go away. The physics taught in highschool is still Newtonian, as the physics useful in day-to-day life still resides within this framework. In art, too, the common living room picture stayed fairly solid throughout the 20th century ... A. Adams, Painter of Light, the nature photos and paintings. But the art of consequence to the art class, and to the art educated layman, was different ... as above ... often deal with the content of the media itself rather than the representation (Aristotle's "mirror of the world" or "mimicing the world" notions).

[Oddly? ... physicists don't show a disgust for people who declare they have a 'fast car' that can hit 170 mph the way that artists show disgust a having an Ansel Adams photo over the fireplace ... though i guess the new Rothko-esque painting genre to match interior design work might have a similar quality.]

My instinct, then, is to go back and study, historically, the period leading up to and then through the old masters ... and then maybe to rationally reconstruct that era(s) as well ... to see what can be learned of the then, to see what might be valuable now.

{For those familiar with A. Danto, i think his influence on my thinking is probably apparent in this and the last post ... and his way of moving from talking about art to science to ethics using the same tools ... that comes from him and also from N. Goodman. ... just to site my sources, i claim no original work here.}

And apparently today, no conclusions are claimed either.