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What artist, regardless of medium, did the most to progress their field?
Many times people credited with creating a genre or style simply placed the final brick, standing on the shoulders of giants. But who had the most profound impact through both luck and effort?
I’m interested in any art form - theater, painting, film making, video games, etc.
Hello, Tea.
In a very niche area (book covers), Michael Whelan did a lot to change what we see when we enter a book store.
Similarly, Frank Frazetta greatly influenced scifi/fantasy movie, novel, comic book, and metal album cover art.
Some boring and obvious answers. There are others in the same fields, but you can't get around these:
J. S. Bach: Music.
W. Shakespeare: Language/drama
Leonardo Da Vinci: Painting, sculpture, design
Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture
Ennio Morricone: Film music
Antoni Gaudi: Design/architecture
Walt Disney: Cartoons/modern movies
Charlie Chaplin: Comedy/movies
Andrew Lloyd Webber: Musicals
Michelangelo: Sculptures/ visual arts
Ansel Adams: Photography (non-people)
The first thing that popped into my head was this recent episode of 99% Invisible about one of the most (unexpectedly) reproduced artworks in history: that schmaltzy “white Jesus” portrait that everyone has seen, even if they’ve never thought much about it. Pretty interesting story about an obscure commercial artist and his bland painting… that actually had a huge impact on culture and religion. It didn’t particularly shake up the art world but many people felt its ripples.
Maybe not someone who did the most to advance their field, but photographers like William Eggleston who pioneered the "mundane" genre of photography. Ansel Adams pushed the genre forward with amazing landscapes, but I like the fact that others found beauty in more everyday scenes.
While we're talking about Eggleston, he didn't just pioneer 'mundane' photography, his landmark exhibition at MoMA allowed color photography as a whole to be taken seriously as an art form. I guess we also have Szarkowski to thank for that as well.
One of my film teachers back in the 90s liked to speak about photography and film being the first newly-invented art form in perhaps 3000 years. Every other form had gone through countless iterations, from sculpture to theater to epic poems. So I would nominate the earliest photographers and cinematographers.
The professor (and I) found it fascinating that we get to live through the dawn of a new form, and that something inherent in that form is that it leaves a permanent record of its growth and development.
But history is speeding up. Now we can place any number of digital arts in that same framework. In fact, most of us are more comfortable with newly-invented arts than we are with traditional ones. With AI on the horizon, it looks like we are about to do it again.
I think the creative rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys was pretty foundational in the transformation of audio production as a creative endeavor in its own right. Up til their era, musical recording largely evolved as musical reproduction--the goal was to capture the musicians as accurately as possible.
Their efforts (and the intersection with the right people and right equipment at EMI/Abbey Road) introduced a lot of the modern vocabulary of pop music: multi-tracking, ADT/doubled voice tracks, etc.