The advent of photography and the birth of modern art

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Art, and particularly contemporary art, might be considered marginal among the great processes of human civilization. However, the role of art is crucial if we analyze the forms and evolution of human intelligence. Marshall Mc Luhan writes, “The artist is that person who in any field, scientific or humanistic, grasps the implications of his own actions and of the new knowledge of his age. The artist is the person endowed with integral awareness.”

Among the cognitive revolutions in history, we also want to consider the advent of contemporary art, the result of the interaction between 19th century culture and photographic technology.

The first group exhibition of Impressionist painters was organized on April 15, 1874 in the studio of photographer Nadar by a number of artists destined to become famous, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and others.

This event marks an intellectual mutation, actually triggered by a technological innovation: photography. In many ways, we are confronted with a disconcerting event for the people of the time, which can be considered analogous to what is happening today with the generation of images by artificial intelligence: the photographer becomes capable of producing more realistic images in an instant than the best painters of the 1800s were able to do. In a sense, centuries of study and efforts of painting to achieve the faithful reproduction of reality become useless: portrait and landscape painters are in danger of losing their role and craft.

Once again, human genius reacts in an unexpected way: the first spark of the path of contemporary art is born, whose goal is no longer realistic reproduction, but a higher intellectual and creative expression, a new way of representing reality together with the emotions it arouses in the artist, Impressionism is born.

But just as Caravaggio would never have been able to imagine Mondrian, today it is not at all easy to identify the new role and skills of the artist and image maker in the age of generative AI: once again, an intellectual-human effort is required.

Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Abstractionism are only the previous stages of a future race of artists toward unknown dimensions of creativity, almost a form of thinking in images.