I notice that many artists are very idealistic. Is art inherently idealistic or is this phenomenon just another symptom of the idealism that is inherent to liberalism? It should be noted that the art industry largely depends on capitalist donors which means that capitalists have a large say in what type of art becomes successful, which then influences new artists as well.
But I still wonder if thought provoking art needs some level of idealism. Would love to read the thoughts of people who have more knowledge on the topic than me.
I always recommend that, John Berger’s book/documentary Ways of Seeing, and Robert Hughes’ book/documentary The Shock of the New. There’s a lot of Marxist art theory out there which informed me but those three were the most important. Art as a social history and modernist mission against bourgeois art is so much more interesting than the way most museums portray it.