Art, Schmart

From an article in today's London Times:
"People appear to care more about gaining evidence of their presence at a cultural landmark than drinking in its pleasures. They want a photograph of themselves in front of the museum or even the star exhibit; they want the souvenir mousemat; in short they want its autograph. The erratic organic memory of looking at beauty seems to have been downgraded to a supporting role."

From Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy In America, 1835:
"...the general mediocrity of fortunes, the absence of superfluous wealth, the universal desire for comfort, and the constant efforts by which everyone attempts to procure it make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of the beautiful in the heart of man. Democratic nations, among whom all these things exist, will therefore cultivate the arts that serve to render life easy in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful...When I arrive in a country where I find some of the finest productions of the arts, I learn from this fact nothing of the social condition or of the political constitution of the country. But if I perceive that the productions of the arts are generally of an inferior quality, very abundant, and very cheap, I am convinced that among the people where this occurs privilege is on the decline and that ranks are beginning to intermingle and will soon become one."

Now that they're done agreeing, how about a little dissension:
From the Times article:
"People are becoming desensitised to the wonder and the sublime in their daily existence. The only way they can feel is by puncturing their ennui with some kind of extreme experience. I once saw a documentary about the extremest of extreme sports, base jumping, in which a man said that he felt alive only just before he was about to jump with a parachute off a high building. This struck me as sad. He was numb to the beauty and thrill of the everyday."

de Tocqueville breaking with his modern day counterpart and his enamor of 'the everyday':
"The painters of the Renaissance generally sought far above themselves, and away from their own time, for mighty subjects, which left to their imagination an unbounded range. Our painters often employ their talents in the exact imitation of the details of private life, which they have always before their eyes; and they are forever copying trivial objects, the originals of which are only too abundant in nature...they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought; in a word, they put the real in the place of the ideal."