• For a long, long time artists had to be responsible for making their own materials. You couldn’t go out and buy paint in a store. Canvas wasn’t cheap and ubiquitous.
• The math of perspective was an unbelievable achievement. People looked at it like we do “3-D” today. We just assume anyone can do it.
• Almost all art, until really recently, had to have a purpose. You didn’t buy it for your bathroom. Almost all of it, for a long time, was religiously focused and put in temples or churches. Straying from that was a revolution (almost literally).
• Museums are a recent development. Before that, you had to go to temples or churches to see it.
• For that matter, owning a piece of mass produced art didn’t happen until really recently as well. You couldn’t mass produce sculptures.
• Getting the human body right took so, so, so much time and learning. Again – we take that for granted.
#learnnewthings schedule:
January 2016 – Water and growth in California
February – Wine
March – Game theory
April – Cryptography
May – Art history
June – The history of railroads in the U.S.
July – Oceanography
August – Football (strategy and theory)
September – Chaos theory
November – Linguistics