A few weeks ago, I came across a study on the evolution of popular music. The researchers analyzed thousands of successful songs and arrived at a remarkable conclusion: the melodic complexity of many chart hits appears to have declined over recent decades. Modern songs often rely on simpler melodic structures and stronger repetition than many of their counterparts from the 1960s and 1970s.
This does not automatically mean that music has become worse. Complexity can shift into other areas—tone color, production, rhythm, or technical refinement. Nevertheless, the observation remains intriguing. At least one aspect of what we understand as musical complexity seems to have diminished within mainstream culture.
The question immediately occurred to me: are there comparable studies in the visual arts?
As it turns out, there are.
In recent years, international research teams have digitally analyzed hundreds of thousands of artworks. They examined color diversity, compositional structures, degrees of order, visual information density, and other measurable characteristics. The results are surprising. Art does not evolve in a straight line from simplicity to complexity, nor from complexity to simplicity. Instead, it oscillates between order and disorder, between reduction and abundance.
The Renaissance possesses a visual structure fundamentally different from that of the Baroque. Impressionism follows different principles than the academic painting of its era. Modernism often reduced complexity deliberately, while other movements increased it again. Art history appears less as a story of continuous progress than as a long and rhythmic breathing between order and chaos.
So far, this is primarily an interesting observation about art history. It becomes truly fascinating when we turn our attention to the present.
Never before in human history have people been exposed to such an overwhelming quantity of images. Advertising, streaming platforms, social media, news websites, stock photography, AI-generated imagery, and countless private photographs accompany us from the moment we wake until we fall asleep. Our eyes now exist within a permanent stream of visual stimuli.
And this is where the real subject begins. Taste does not emerge in a vacuum. Taste is learned.
A wine connoisseur is not born a connoisseur. A tea enthusiast learns to appreciate bitterness. A lover of classical music gradually develops the ability to hear structures that remain invisible to others.
Why should vision function any differently?
Some time ago, I heard about a blind tasting of premium spirits. Many younger participants rated products made from industrial alcohol and artificial flavorings higher than handcrafted, complex distillates. This does not mean the industrial products were objectively better. It simply means that taste had adapted itself to different signals: sweetness, immediate intensity, easy readability, and effects that can be understood instantly.
Perhaps something similar is happening with images.
Digital platforms reward images that function within seconds. Strong colors. Perfect faces. Clear emotions. Dramatic lighting. Unambiguous messages. The more often we encounter such images, the more familiar they become. And the more familiar they become, the stranger alternative visual languages appear.
This is where artificial intelligence becomes culturally significant. Not because it produces images. But because it produces averages.
An AI system is trained on millions of existing images. It learns which compositions occur frequently, which faces attract attention, which lighting styles perform well, and which colors generate engagement. As a result, it does not primarily generate the unknown. It generates statistically optimized familiarity.
The result is imagery that is often impressive. Technically accomplished. Instantly understandable. Pleasant to look at. Yet remarkably seldom surprising.
The real risk, therefore, may not be that machines create art. The real risk may be that machines perfect average taste. And every average stabilizes itself through repetition. The more frequently we encounter the same patterns, the more normal they appear. The more normal they appear, the harder it becomes for alternative visual languages to gain attention. Yet the history of art has always been the history of deviation.
Impressionism was initially regarded as an annoyance. Expressionism was considered offensive by many contemporaries. Photography itself was denied artistic legitimacy for decades. Nearly every significant innovation began as a disruption of established habits of seeing. Perhaps we stand at a similar moment today. There is, however, one crucial difference. Earlier artists struggled against technical limitations. Today they struggle against algorithmically reinforced habits.
At this point, discussions often become uncomfortable. There is a temptation to blame the audience. People, we are told, only consume surfaces. They lack patience. They lack attention. They no longer care for complexity.This explanation is probably too simple.
Very few people are born art lovers. They become art lovers through encounters. Through teachers, friends, exhibitions, books, conversations, and unexpected experiences that change the way they see. Nobody expects a visitor at a wine tasting to recognize the subtleties of a great vintage with their first sip. Nobody would criticize a music student for failing to understand the structure of a Bach fugue as a child.
Why should art be any different?
Perhaps the true responsibility of artists, gallery owners, curators, writers, and art educators is not to follow existing taste. Perhaps their task is to create access. Art does not need to be simplified. But it must be made accessible. Those are not the same thing.
Accessibility does not mean eliminating every challenge. It does not mean explaining a work until nothing remains of its mystery. It means offering the viewer a door through which they may enter.
A good gallery owner does not merely sell artworks. They create encounters. A good curator does not simply hang works on walls. They create connections. A good writer does not tell people what to think. They open new perspectives. And a good artist does not merely show something. They invite us to look more carefully. In an age where images are consumed ever more rapidly, this task may become more important than ever.
Yet this also raises an uncomfortable question for artists. The romantic answer is simple: remain true to yourself and trust that posterity will eventually recognize your significance.It is a noble thought. Unfortunately, posterity does not pay the rent. It does not cover electricity bills. And it does not help repay loans.
The biographies of many artists we admire today are remarkably poor business models. Vincent van Gogh may be the most famous example, but he is far from the only one. Artistic importance and economic success are not the same thing.
Artists therefore face a difficult choice.
One option is complete adaptation. Produce precisely the kind of images that already succeed. Follow trends, platforms, and algorithms. This may be financially effective, but it places the artist in direct competition with millions of other producers—and increasingly with artificial intelligence itself. Anyone who lives by trends lives by something that may disappear tomorrow.
The opposite option is complete refusal. Ignore audience, market, and zeitgeist altogether. Create exclusively for oneself. This may be artistically consistent, but it often leads to invisibility. Between these extremes lies a third path. Separate the work from the access point. Let the work remain demanding. Make the entry understandable.
Many artists regard explanation as a betrayal of their work. Perhaps this is a mistake. Most people have never been taught how to engage with complex art. Why should they know automatically how to do so?
The quality of art is not necessarily declining.The visibility of quality is.
Perhaps artists in the future will be threatened less by other artists than by the sheer volume of what already exists. The competitor is not the better photographer.
The competitor is the endless wall of images.
For galleries, this creates an almost inevitable new role. Galleries were once primarily places where art was displayed. Increasingly, they may become places where attention itself is curated. Their most important achievement may no longer be hanging pictures on walls. It may be creating spaces where people learn once again to look for longer than three seconds.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of our age is therefore not the creation of new art. Never before have so many images been produced. Never before have we possessed such powerful tools. The real challenge may lie elsewhere. In cultivating viewers.
In helping people rediscover forms of perception that require time. That require patience. That cannot be understood within seconds.
If technical perfection is increasingly delegated to machines, then this may become the most important task of artists, gallery owners, curators, and art educators alike: not merely to produce art, but to create the conditions under which art can still be seen.
Because perhaps the rarest resource of the future will not be the good image. It will be the human being willing to look long enough.