Industrialization leads to urbanization, more and more people quit the countryside for production jobs and always more new jobs servicing the production activities. Industrial development induces artistic changes that in turn will direct the forms and colors of new industrial products for mass consumption.
Continuing a trend that robber-merchants had started in the 16th-17th centuries, the barons of the nascent textile, steel and machinery industries in the 18th and 19th centuries order portraits of themselves and their families and landscapes of their local environments to decorate their walls. The painting technique remains classic and subjects are treated realistically.
Nineteenth century trains and steam boats shorten distances, the vision of the world is altered and Van Gogh and Gauguin take liberties with painting techniques and their subjects start to be treated less realistically, impressionism, pointillism follow. The atrocities of the first world war and the following economic crisis in Germany gave birth to “Die Brucke”, German and Norden expressionism depict in stark contrasted colors the inner feelings of the local intelligentsia.
The successive economic booms induced by the introduction of electricity, cars, telephones, radios, aeroplanes and so on deepen further the altering of our vision of the world. Cubism, surrealism and other distortions of reality follow.
The 2nd world war consecrates the US as the world's military-industrial factory, financing is realized in great part through money creation. The great depression is overcome and the US' after war economic model of the military-industrial research and development complex doubled by a civilian mass production of consumer goods is firmly established. The countryside is emptied followed by urbanization and later sub-urbanization. The consumption society grows hand in hand with full democratization, people are given the right to chose what to buy, products and politicians. It's the total triumph of materialism and of individualism. Art in the process also becomes a merchandise comparable to whatever other merchandises.
The last fifty years saw much intellectual and moral confusion. Political ideologies acted as spiritual fogs and the awakening in the eighties at the demise of those ideologies left most of the intelligentsia and artists with a bitter taste of emptiness but the fall in this abyss is only like an instant on the map of history. It shall be followed by a long period of intellectual and artistic renaissance that will last the best part of the twenty-first century.
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