>>3683955You have been hyperstimulated by media probably since before you could walk, and you live in a civilization with millions of people employed full time in producing mass entertainment with lifelike motion and sound. You're typing this on a box that can call up a video of a dragon tearing down a town or a space battle with hundreds of warships lazing each other to pieces over an exploding planet. You are probably completely accustomed to driving down a road at 70MPH and reacting to an environment flying by at speeds that would terrify someone from say, 1800.
The pace of life was slower in the past, and there were far fewer opportunities to look at *anything* that wasn't part of the humdrum environment you'd been looking at your whole life. If you saw something cool, you had to carry it in your memory or go back to see it again (or learn to draw).
You only saw these vast, detailed academic paintings if you went to the salons, kind of like going to the cinema, and the most vast, cosmopolitan empire might only have a few hundred painters working at the top level of talent, producing a few paintings a year.
That's not a personal criticism of you; it's just that our environment and inner life is vastly different from theirs.
For example, I remember going a couple years without a TV in college (pre netflix, didn't use youtube), and when my roommate brought one home, we were mesmerized by any stupid shit that came on... daytime court shows, etc were suddenly really interesting.
