I hate abstract art. But Western art has been technically moving towards it forever.
Allow me to explain: if you look at pre-Renaissance European art, it's blocky, flat and largely looking and unrealistic. It's in absolutes, because the truths of life in this time were about God and religion. However, once we enter the Renaissance, as science, the wisdom of the ancients, travel, trade and everything else flourish and enrich the minds of artists, the world becomes a little less flat and black and white. Less absolute.
Paintings become softer, more grounded in the present reality and world of the Renaissance artists, who are becoming more open to science and less grounded in any one belief.
Let's move even further, away from classical styles, towards impressionism, cubism, et cetera. The art grows even less solid, even less blocky and grounded. Look at the art of today, it is at times incomprehensible, sometimes grounded in nothing, torn away from the realities seen in art of the past.
As technology advances, and we learn more about the world around us, talk more about it, everything becomes less absolute. Binary, fragmented, almost unreal. We are simultaneously everything and nothing.
And so art becomes abstract.
