In prehistoric times, “high-art” meant the equivalent of the most basic storytelling today. When most humans would have been slogging all day just to make sure that they had food for the day and weren’t going to be eaten by some bigger animal, it would have been the rare individual who had the time to remember and recall stories to tell people. After a while, the human economy had progressed enough that this high art had become accessible to basically all humans.

You can follow this pattern again and again thruout human history. 10,000 years ago, painting was a rare skill, now every child in school in the U.S. learns to paint on a level pretty close to prehistoric paintings. 150 years ago, photography was very expensive and it took substantial technical training to become a photographer. Now, anyone who can point-n-shoot is a photographer. And many of those point-n-shooters are actually taking very accomplished photographs.

We’ve reached a point where the majority of people in a developed world are very highly educated and functioning. In the U.S., about 85% of people graduate from high school. [1] A number of other countries are well above 90%. That means that all those people spent at least 13 years in school. Even compared to a century ago, this is a dramatic difference. As people become more educated, the bar is raised for “high-art”.

Now many people have this idea that “high-art” must be separate from more widespread art, but now the education difference between the “high-artist” and the average person has become quite narrow. The original impulse for high-art was for highly developed art, which meant choosing a person and devoting extra resources so that person could spend time developing their art.

Now it seems that since the difference in education and resources between “high-artists” and the average person is becoming ever more minimal, this “high-art” impulse has shifted to focusing on obscurity. It is rare that an artist is actually working in a medium that just about anyone could learn in their spare time after work. So in order to maintain the cache of “high-art”, the art world has become focused on making things about obscure insider references to a very insular world that really has nothing to do with
the original idea of having someone who works beyond what the average person is capable.

This means to me that “high-art” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. And you can see this in the flurry of artistic output that is available on the internet. I say we are all the better for it.