Off the cuff, my guess is that the advent of manufacturing was likely the culprit? It's much easier to handcraft a finely ornate door knob or latch when you're only making a few. But once everything went to being factory produced, you of course then wanted easier, less error-prone designs that machines and assembly lines could more easily produce, en masse.
I'm not an architecture historian, but I also suspect that fashion trends have something to do with it too? More baroque designs may have been popular back then. But more recently, sleeker, more modern design have come en vogue. (Company logos are a great example of this.)
Finally, I also offer a third explanatory theory: increasingly, I do feel we --as a people writ large-- have shifted to a much more life of interiority vs exteriority. eg. I spend most of my day in front of a computer. I still see plenty of aesthetic beauty, but much of it is in the form of AI art on Midjourney or amazing content on YouTube.
In any case, thanks for writing this up! I guess I'd just humbly submit that beauty in public works hasn't gone anywhere; it's just taken a different form now. To quote the famous meme: "There are cathedrals everywhere for all with eyes to see!" 🙂
As a Russian, my experience with our own decline through the 20th century and subsequent emergence has really colored my perspective on this. Mainly, I think a lot of what's happening, as you point out, is that these people are looking in places that are worse today than they were in the past, but ignoring the places that are better. The Russian Empire undeniably had better architecture than the USSR, which built ugly gray blocks, but the USSR also employed really cool mosaic artists to inlay very unique mosaic artwork into those ugly gray blocks. That didn't exist before and hasn't existed since. There are grassroots movements trying to save mosaics ongoing. Soviet statues are really cool and hold up really well years later and carry a certain timeless quality. So it's a give and take. Some things got worse, but some things had this invested quality that people are looking for. They may look at the examples of modern art you present in your pice and scoff and turn their nose, but that's just a question of esthetics and taste, not of general decline.
Off the cuff, my guess is that the advent of manufacturing was likely the culprit? It's much easier to handcraft a finely ornate door knob or latch when you're only making a few. But once everything went to being factory produced, you of course then wanted easier, less error-prone designs that machines and assembly lines could more easily produce, en masse.
I'm not an architecture historian, but I also suspect that fashion trends have something to do with it too? More baroque designs may have been popular back then. But more recently, sleeker, more modern design have come en vogue. (Company logos are a great example of this.)
Finally, I also offer a third explanatory theory: increasingly, I do feel we --as a people writ large-- have shifted to a much more life of interiority vs exteriority. eg. I spend most of my day in front of a computer. I still see plenty of aesthetic beauty, but much of it is in the form of AI art on Midjourney or amazing content on YouTube.
In any case, thanks for writing this up! I guess I'd just humbly submit that beauty in public works hasn't gone anywhere; it's just taken a different form now. To quote the famous meme: "There are cathedrals everywhere for all with eyes to see!" 🙂
As a Russian, my experience with our own decline through the 20th century and subsequent emergence has really colored my perspective on this. Mainly, I think a lot of what's happening, as you point out, is that these people are looking in places that are worse today than they were in the past, but ignoring the places that are better. The Russian Empire undeniably had better architecture than the USSR, which built ugly gray blocks, but the USSR also employed really cool mosaic artists to inlay very unique mosaic artwork into those ugly gray blocks. That didn't exist before and hasn't existed since. There are grassroots movements trying to save mosaics ongoing. Soviet statues are really cool and hold up really well years later and carry a certain timeless quality. So it's a give and take. Some things got worse, but some things had this invested quality that people are looking for. They may look at the examples of modern art you present in your pice and scoff and turn their nose, but that's just a question of esthetics and taste, not of general decline.