What's the reason other cultures had inferior art to european?

>what about African art?
It's pretty cool

European Exceptionalism.

Though their iconography was pretty goofy looking

Look at how bored St George looks

Painting and sculpture is down to Greek influence. Greeks pioneered naturalistic painting and sculpture (derived from Egypt), which was passed onto the Romans. It survived in Byzantium while dying out in Western Europe and the Islamic world. Then it was reintroduced to the West from Byzantium and from ancient ruins, first in 13th-14th century Italy before spreading across Western Europe. The adoption of oil painting in the Netherlands then brought it to the height of its development. Meanwhile, Islamic restrictions on art meant they only had small miniatures, while India mostly had frescoes which rarely survive, though their sculpture was brilliant. China and Japan had much better painting and sculpture than anyone for centuries, but they didn't really improve that much after the Song Dynasty.

Western architecture got gud around 1000 AD, though it wasn't the best until around the 12th-13th centuries with the rise of Gothic. Until then Indian/Southeast Asian architecture had been best.

Yes, but Asians can't compete with Mozart, Dvorak, Beethoven, Mahler or Stravinsky

Retard alert.

Beauty is the key.

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India, 500 AD.

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Sogdia, 750 AD.

Europeans are more autistic.

>people reply with pics of awesome non-european art
>somehow it doesn't count

honestly you sound like a /pol/tard

to produce a work like that you need to find a master artist, provide him with the right materials and support him for a long period of time so he can learn the skills

this in turn requires 100s of full time professional artists and many middle classes and nobles free disposable income to hire them

you also need generations of accumulated knowledge, the right tools, paints, materials and practices

if you are repeatedly ravaged by muslims and mongols your art will remain at the level europe's was in the medieval era

you need 100s of artists to choose from rather

What's funny is that most people lifting up Greek art of greater Indian art fail to recognize Indian sculpture conventions were most likely transmitted via Greek Bactria.

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Asians had Mozarts 1000 years before europeans had them.

>Music is documented as far back as the Zhou dynasty and forms an important thread in the Confucian tradition. Musical harmony was believed to bring harmony to life. Confucius said he could predict a kingdom's problems from the music played at court. He disapproved of 'immoral' dance music and thought that the noisier the music was the more the state was in jeopardy. Music was more than mere background entertainment it set the whole mood and character of thought. Chinese music was an harmonious emanation tied up with the concept of ‘qi’ the all pervading life-essence. In the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng dating to about 430BCE 124 musical instruments of all types and sizes were found.

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Define inferior

Your subjective opinion and lack of knowledge of the aesthetic endeavors of other cultures.

Theravadins love to blame Zoroastrianism for Mahayana, but rarely acknowledge the first Boddhisattva sculptures are Greco Buddhist.

Musical instruments were known since the stone age you clueless fuck

>what's the reason other cultures had inferior art to european?

>art is objective

kek

>it's a Europe is one giant monolith thread
>it's a yuropoor takes credit for Mediterranean achievements when his ancestors were probably living in mud huts thread

I love everything out of Asia, the Americas and some parts of Africa, and a lot of it was better than European art for centuries/millennia. But you've got to admit that between the 12th-15th centuries, Western Europe did get to be best at pretty much everything. Best architecture by the 13th century, best sculpture and painting by the 14th, etc, and for the most parts they stayed the best at these things until the modern day. And all this came after a period when Western Europe was pretty much the worst at most things and the best at nothing. Western Europe also has the best surviving music, but before the 15th century I think that's just because more survives in notated form and after that I'd put it down to the printing press.

So what happened? Personally I get the impression that it was a mix of Greco-Roman inspiration alongside unique attitudes towards art, artists and patronage. But that's not very specific.

Can anyone explain this without resorting to /pol/shit and Orientalism?

Culture is an expression of a certain vitality, a vitality like economic vitality or spiritual vitality.

Europe experienced a booming economy, thriving education and spiritual vitality during the period you describe.

Europe going from small crude churches to gigantic cathedrals being built all over the place took place in the time of a single lifespan.

>But you've got to admit that between the 12th-15th centuries, Western Europe did get to be best at pretty much everything

Europe is like that lightbulb that shines the brightest but then goes off because the energy ran out.

wait untill all of your churches and sculptures are demolished by your "new europeans"

>As the number of Frenchmen in France continues to decline due to record-low birth rates, high emigration and Muslim immigration, so do the members of catholic faith, who are now at an all time low. For many cities in France, especially cities in which Christians are the minority, the lack of interest and high property value on which the buildings stand simply does not justify the cost of restoring the churches. Many mayors choose the cheaper demolitions over costly restorations. Thousands of churches are to be demolished over the next years and replaced with shopping malls, stores, apartments or parking lots.

youtube.com/watch?v=S8pXJWVszNM

>But you've got to admit that between the 12th-15th centuries, Western Europe did get to be best at pretty much everything.
No, actually, I don't, because aesthetic values are not universal.

>European Art
Yeah, a woman menstruating in public over a piece of paper sure is superior.

>Franks were busy making kiddie doodles.
>Meanwhile in T'ang China.

I understand why it got good after 1000 AD, what I don't get is why it got so much better than everywhere else so fast. Why didn't the flourishing of Ayutthaya, Majapahit, Ming China, Abbasid Iraq, the Swahili Coast, etc, produce similarly spectacular strides in art and architecture. Not that those civilizations didn't produce great art, but they didn't experience sudden unprecedented explosions of creativity in every sector like the West did. For example, Ming China had great art, but it wasn't that much better than Yuan or Song art, and in some ways I'd say it was inferior.

This is why I think attitudes towards art are important, I think in Western Europe art and architecture were treated like a competition between a huge number of patrons (whether communities like cities or wealthy individuals) who were constantly trying to outdo each other with the best churches, paintings and sculptures, which meant that economic prosperity went right into art patronage and innovation. Elsewhere, art was either less important (Islam), was more bound by tradition (China), or just wasn't very competitive (India), and in general patronage was more limited to a small elite or ruling dynasty (except in China).

But I feel like this is very vague and I really don't really have solid facts to back it up.

Churches are also houses of allah so chances are that they would be kept in better condition by muslims than by atheists.

Maybe because you don't know enough to tell the difference?

How you appreciate art is subjective, but there are things about art that I can say are more or less impressive about a piece, like scale, intricacy, naturalism, etc. I can't objectively say that a 17th century baroque cathedral is more beautiful than a contemporary Japanese temple, and in fact I'd say I prefer the latter, but regardless of what my tastes are I have to admit that the baroque one has more intricate and elaborate decoration, that its greater in scale, that its more technically impressive and that a much greater deal of craftsmanship went into its creation. Whether I like it or not, it's more impressive. And I find that after the High Middle Ages, the most impressive stuff is mostly coming from Western Europe.

Don't know enough of what? Asian art? I'm much more familiar with Asian and African art than I am with European art, and I'm familiar enough with that of the Americas to know how good it was. It was only when I started getting more into Western history that I started to realise how much its art outshone that of the rest of the world after the High Middle Ages.

>take art history
>85% of the class is looking at jesus in various forms

Posting the whole thing because I love it.

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So basically proto pepe?

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I like art, but so much Jesus gets old.

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Kraut please get out. Realism does not make art more great.

>Western Europe
You've meant to say southern Europe right?

Some of the ancient egyptian sculptures are really neat.

no hes being selective in what art he designates as good art, fake selection like that is how you start troll treads

You silly ball of rice, the Pieta is a fantastic balance of realism and the abstract

>Christ is depicted as a thirty year old man, per realism
>the Virgin is depicted as a girl of 16
>It works
>Works, hell, it opens the flood gates