Where's the artist in the art?

A urinal with Marcel Duchamp's signature painted on the side started it all. He wanted to challenge the assumption that art required an artist, so in 1917, Duchamp submitted the otherwise untouched bathroom fixture for exhibition and revolutionized art. \nHis ideology has been adopted and practiced by today's "modern" artists. From Jackson Pollack's random paint splatterings to Ad Reinhardt's "Black Painting," which is just that, artists seem to be removing themselves from their art more and more. The artwork of today seems to require less talent and more drug usage. Quite frankly, it sucks.\nIt would be perfectly understandable for the art lover to fret about the future of art with its recent downward spiral towards the dumpster, but I am not worried. By examining history and the transitions between each artistic period, you can see that new art is always the antithesis of the old. \nAfter the French Revolution of 1789, the "classical principles of reason and clarity were challenged by the new Romantic enthusiasm for the primacy of feeling," according to "The Illustrated History of Art."\nFrancisco de Goya was a forerunner in the Romantic Movement. Instead of the idyllic, happy and heroic subjects of the Greek, Roman and medieval societies, Goya focused his art on madness, war and death. He painted the gorier and less popular scenes of mythology, like one of Saturn devouring his own children. \nSir John Everett Millais rebelled against the same era as Goya, but he did so by painting tender scenes of every day life. He received criticism for his 1850 work, "Christ in the House of His Parents," which portrayed a young Jesus in a messy carpenter's shop. This new style came to be called Realism.\nThe Impressionists, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and others, disliked the Realists' posed scenes. The invention of the camera in the 1860s inspired a fascination with capturing moments as they were seen. They often set up easels outdoors and made multiple studies of the same subject. In fact, Monet submitted 20 different views of the same cathedral with different lighting for exhibition.\nThe Impressionists painted the beautiful as well as the ugly. Their goal was to provide snapshots of life at the time. Many of their paintings were scenes of industry. The Symbolists were discouraged by this dirty and corrupt world they found themselves in, and reverted back to mystic and fanciful subjects. Gustave Moreau painted scenes of classical mythology and unicorns.\nIn a style reminiscent of Goya's, Edvard Munch painted such works as, "The Scream" and "Self-Portrait in Hell." He was disgusted by Symbolism and in a notebook entry dated 1890 wrote, "no longer should you paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. These must be human beings who breathe and feel and love and suffer." But Munch's passion has been sucked out of "modern" art. The artist is no longer even a part of the creation.\nThe art that our great-great grandchildren will dream up will have to be breathtakingly beautiful to oppose the trash that the past few generations have created. I look forward to the next revolution.