Since we can talk about art in here without straying off the point, I happened across a pair of reviews on the Guardian website of a recent exhibition at the National Gallery of the now-critically-unfashionable Spanish painter Sorolla.
https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...anish-master-of-light-review-national-gallery
"His painting is all effects, and concerned with effects. He is interested in the glint of patent leather, the transparency of gauze over cotton, above all the play of light on all sorts of surfaces. Occasionally this results in some real originality, as in his portrait of Clotilde and their newborn daughter as two dark heads adrift in an oceanic white bed, new stars of the sea. But generally it leads to a kind of luxury painting, richly calorific, joyously upbeat and too often glib."
https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...anish-master-of-light-national-gallery-review
"He’s a sensualist, not a thinker. The absence of concept in his paintings makes him the slave of sight. Led by his eyes, he seems incredibly unconscious of what he’s doing."
Under both of these articles are comments from people responding with bemusement and horror to these critical views.
Anyway, I mention all this because it seems like in the art world at least there's a
disdain for technique. Technique, talent, aesthetic pleasure - these are all
nice things, but if there's (allegedly) 'nothing' else, then it's all for naught, or at least all for second-rate.