Art is all about style, so how can you advocate anything that is out of style right now ...?

Home / Education / ARChives / Discussions

Art is all about style, so how can you advocate anything that is out of style right now ...?

From

Published on before 2005


Q: Art is all about style, so how can you advocate anything that is out of style right now as being good/true or anything that it in style right now as being bad/false? That's a direct contradiction!

If you think about it, all styles are "out" except for the current one aren't they? So by that logic what is in style right could never change to anything else could it?

Be that as it may, the problem here is with the assertion (sometimes an implicit one) that what determines the good/true is some kind of consensus and that by definition anything that it popular is good/true and anything that is unpopular is therefore false/bad. This is a version of the the argumentum ad populum fallacy in which the claim is that whatever if popular is therefore true.

Anyway, we are witnessing a rebirth of interest in realism which draws on much of the best of the western tradition in order to make the next step after this unfortunate 20th century dead end. So will this new surge in popularity in realism make it therefore be good by this argument? Will it also make the modernist stuff bad by the same reasoning? I don't buy that kind of fallacious reasoning myself, but this line of argument leads directly to an obvious contradiction.