child prodigy painter

[hadespussercats]

Impressionist art is over one hundred years old-- hardly a current trend.

No but it's still trendy. In the sense that it's very much fashionable to own, and fashionable to like.

I would predict that it will always be so. Because it's slap bang in the middle.
It's not realism, which now doesn't look so stunningly real to our modern eyes, that are accustomed to genuine realism from the digital photograph.
And it's not totally abstract, so we don't have a little voice in our heads saying "what the fuck is that?" or even "is the artist taking the piss?"
So it's in the ideal place. All that stuff in the middle will stay fashionable, especially if it has nice colours.

As for your Lourdes comment, well, of course part of what I'm getting off on, as you so gracefully put it, is illusory-- art is all about taking the concrete and imbuing it with illusions.

Yes, but are part of the illusions already in your head, or do they come totally from the paint on a canvas?
And do you need the speil that goes with the painting, before the illusion is complete?

How many works of art could stand on their own, without any accompanying speil? Sometimes this is given with a work, sometimes indirectly through interviews, or written introductions to an exhibition.

Perhaps we should regard the speil as part of the work of art. In many cases it's the most important bit. The only problem is that the speil belongs to everyone. You can only "own" the paint and canvas. So if I was an artist, I would supply the bullshit along with the canvas, in my own handwriting, and titled "bullshit of the artist".
If people will buy "shit of the artist", they should be well pleased with that.
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I rarely read exhibition notes, beyond looking for the title and the artist's name if I'm interested-- I'd rather draw my own conclusions about a work than accept what the curators have to say.

The spell, if it exists, is certainly part of the work of art itself. I'm not sure, then, what you're getting at when you talk about the spell belonging to everyone, but only the paint and canvas being ownable. It seems to me that you think artists shouldn't be allowed to sell their work-- that it cheapens it somehow, no matter how expensive the painting itself is. The conflict between art and the business of art is an old one, but artists need to eat, like anyone else. I don't see why selling their work necessarily makes them bullshit artists.

And I hate to break it to you, but a digital photograph is no more genuine realism than a Bronzino painting. Beyond the sorts of touch-ups and changes that can be performed upon the photograph, there's the inescapable fact that a photograph is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world, which one must be, in your terms, conditioned to understand.