Sentient Muppet Factory by @bbeetthh

I´d emphasize that your point on the aesthetic part of past abstract art responded to something social or art that preceded it. Generative art today is sometimes done just because you can do it. It´s on the edge of being design. And that is fine, but I think what you are asking is what does it do for us to engage with it on a human and social level. How does it push us to think differently about who we are? Again, not that all art needs to do this, but the abstract art of the past was a f*** you to the things that came before it and the human conditions of that time. This abstract art is not pushing those types of buttons. Or maybe it is, and we are too in the moment still. No clear answers, but if we analyze the state of things, which we can via the internet and survey books on art of the past 20 years, abstraction is not responding to anything as it has been there since it was spawned into existence because photography relieved painting of the duty of being figurative. Abstraction has never stopped since it was invented, hence, it does not respond to anything. It just is. For example. The last big use/abuse of abstraction led to Zombie Formalism. news.artnet.com/news/history… "What was it? The artist and critic Walter Robinson coined the phrase in a 2014 piece, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” addressing the vogue for a certain type of painting among collectors known for their speculative investment in young artists. They’d snap up artworks for relatively low prices and flip the works at auctions soon afterward. The work they favored—by artists like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, and Jacob Kassay—was ubiquitous three or four years ago. And, as the critic Jerry Saltz noted with dismay in a widely circulated essay for New York, a lot of it looked the same."

Beth Frey´s Sentient Muppet Factory @bbeetthh