>>5218306Making an impact on a movement or on the history of art to warrant a museum place is very far from the point of art, once again. The fact that van gogh inadvertently ended up doing any of these things is, by your admission, not what makes his art "good" - that's just the reason normies go to museums and take pictures of it.
what makes it good is much more personal and completely unconnected to the physical context in which you see his work. there is a two way relationship when it comes to this - for art to communicate with you, you must first on some level communicate with it, and this is exactly why art is so incredibly diverse and exists in a gazillion forms.
the point is, whether a ruan painting exists in the concept art sphere or in the fantasy illustration sphere or in the culinary sphere is completely irrelevant, and even if it never sees the light of day as a historical artifact, i can look at it and say "nice" for literally any reason completely personal to me - maybe based on shared values, or maybe on my own, doesn't matter. this is the basis of why art has meaning at all. music taste, film taste, taste in anything amounts to the same. you may not see it but you're inadvertently expressing your subjectivity on the matter when you say "X good y bad".
art doesn't have to be anything, it quite simply has to BE, and someone might find some way to connect with it. look at leyendecker and think about how he fits into this. look at sargent. and then look at all of them and see how different they all are, and wonder how it's possible to reconcile them with each other, if art should look a certain way. and this is totally confined within the realm of representational painting - there's plenty more outside of that
