Detroit has a fantastic Institute of Art!
There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it, then Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the beginnings of the interpretive approach to art. Modernism and post-modernism are the results of decades of hanging on to the idea that the standard of beauty is subjective and based on one’s own vision of the world combined with a message about the rejection of anything eternal. Somewhere along the way, it became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was “counter-cultural” (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness and open the minds of those who viewed it to new and wondrous avenues of thought (like contemporary art)…and what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck. I suppose some might argue that that, in itself, goes toward proving that art is consciously fraudulent. Rothko and Warhol and others that recognized that art has a patently commercial aspect to it might just agree…