Why is art underrated?

[Aries]

Why is art so underrated?

 

Back then, in years when internet, sharing, social medias and apps were not so global accessible, art was taken some other way. Today it's kinda underrated and ignored.

It's still the same - someone should learn and master a knowledge, skills, technique to become good, better than others, to know how to create a masterpiece. I don't know what makes today's artists so invisible but I left with the feelings everybody without idea what they are doing, without education, call themselves artists, an nobody could oppose because most of the people actually have no idea what real art is.

 

Any thoughts?

[Impulsive_Egg]

I don't think it's underrated, but underappreciated. There's a good chunk of people who are convinced that art contributes nothing and then they sit down and watch TV or listen to music or read books that were made and directed by artists.  But at the same time there is also an astounding chunk of people who look at and consume classical, contemporary, and modern visual art. I've seen the art institute in chicago get as much traffic as ever before Covid hit. There is a plethora of artists alive and in living memory who have a following, like Stuart Semple or Basquiat. In fact it's even easier to follow and admire artists big and small because of social media. These are people who love to create and make statements and draw (so to speak) from their souls.

 

What is considered art couldn't even be defined when I went to art school. It's often said to be something created that evokes feelings within you, and I like to think that's the closest anyone can get to a true definition, but what it is I guess is up to the creator and the consumer. When I did go to art school, I learned how to draw the human body first, then I learned about the fundamentals of art (composition, color theory, forms of patterns, etc), and then we went into illustration and watercolor and oil painting and stuff like that, and to tell you the truth, nobody had any idea what they were doing. We were there to learn how to create, and the act of creating is challenging in and of itself.

 

I want to ask, what do you consider "real" art?

[ACDragonMaster]

I don't think this is true at all.  What you're thinking of is what people refer to "fine art", that is, art that is designated as such arbitrarily, usually by people with wealth/influence/power of some kind, versus the common, everyday art.  And while it's true that the foothold fine art has had has probably declined, as the snobbery surrounding it has been rather thoroughly mocked, anything that didn't fall into that category back in the day sure wasn't appreciated.  How many old comic books were praised for their art?  What about pulp novels?  Tolkien's books weren't exactly popular with the critics, many now-famous painters barely eked out a living when they were alive, and Alex Guinness had some rather scathing things to say about what he thought of the original Star Wars' script.

 

So I think it's less that it's underrated/appreciated more now than before, so much as the snob appeal of so-called fine art has declined in common culture.