Julian Baggini identifies three “trends in art over the past century [which] have opened the door for dilettantes to make their mark: technology, abstraction and conceptualism”:
[F]or many art forms, it is indeed true that “anyone could do that”, in the sense that
anyone has the technology or technique to hand to execute the idea. It has become possible for more and more people, often untrained, to express their creative imagination as doing so has become less and less dependent on technical expertise. However, not everyone can have the ideas, the eye or the ear to come up with something worth making real. That core of invention remains elusive, beyond most of us most of the time. The best answer to the moan “I could have done that” remains “but you didn’t”. No one else came up with the geometric lines and block colours of Mondrian before he did, not because they lacked the skill, but because they lacked the vision. Technology and trends in art have not, therefore, made really good art more democratic, they have simply widened the membership of the elite.
(Close-up of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie in MoMa by Tomás Fano)
The Dish 