Here's an interesting question...
Art has always been a playground for inventive and creative geniuses, as well as for spectators eager for new sensations.
Some artists have disrupted the rules of the game, swimming against the current, not content with the general consensus or the approval of their peers, nor with validation from gallery owners or critics.
Here's a short, non-exhaustive list :
- Leonardo da Vinci, for his revolutionary painting techniques and inventions.
- The Postman Cheval, for his extremely long obstinacy in creating a masterpiece of naive art, fighting against all odds, simply for the love of art !
- Claude Monet, for his impressive impressionist paintings.
- Vincent van Gogh, for his swirling, crazy sunflowers and hallucinatory skies.
- Salvador Dali, for his genius, madness, and surreal visions.
- Pablo Picasso, for his deconstruction of vanishing perspectives.
- Marcel Duchamp, for his excellent paintings (unfortunately not well-known and ahead of their time) and the amusing revolutions brought by his Ready-Mades.
- Piero Manzoni, for his postures, inventiveness, and provocations.
Where are we today ?
Since the 1980s, not much has happened :
Artists reproduce works with barely any modifications from other artists who have gained the complacent unanimity of curators, gallery owners, museums, and, incidentally... the public.
« What's the trend right now ? »
Choose from piles (of things and stuff), construction (deconstruction) sites, paint splashes, ...
Or they find a niche and stick to it, producing only one type of work, endlessly repeated with neutral variations, not too shocking, not too new...
Staying in their comfort zone, we can call them comfort-artists !!
« We shouldn't scare away buyers ! »
As for gallery owners, they no longer dare to take risks or seek out innovative, surprising, delirious, or brilliant artists.
Their choices are no longer driven by passion or emotion but by market forces.
Staying in their comfort zone, we can call them ultra-comfort-gallery-owners !!
« We shouldn't scare away buyers ! »
The trend for over twenty years has been towards ultra-conceptual and hyper-intellectualized art, where the visual and understanding of the artwork have little importance.
In short, nothing new in the West !
We remain in something conventional and sellable.
But if we answer « YES » to the initial question, the primary purpose of art would be entirely different :
Not conforming to what exists but seeking in creation what can be outside of our time (in the past or the future).
On this criterion, any artist who paints in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci would be declared « Non-conformist ».
I hereby establish the first laws of the manifesto of « Re-New Art » :
Article 1.
Any artist who, in addition to being non-conformist, pursues a continuous quest for research and development of new forms in the visual arts, including by drawing inspiration from models before 1980, will be declared a « Genius. »
Article 2.
Any artist who brings intelligence into their artistic creations, including in abstract or conceptual art, will be declared a « Super-Genius. »
P.S :
I ask forgiveness from all those I haven't mentioned (Bosch, Rodin, Caravaggio, Gauguin, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Magritte, etc.), but that was not the purpose.