Many people, including myself, know far more about contemporary art and its audiences than you are led to believe by Cheerskep's oddly imperiously judgmental comments on the forum's artist members As a clinical psychologist you might be expected to question such summative and universalist comments, especially since they lack any substantive data. There is no study that shows or even suggests that contemporary artists as a group favor or don't seek and appeal to their audiences (let's ignore for the moment that no guidelines for grouping audiences exists except in popular, casual guesswork, and no guidelines exist to define contemporary art audiences). If anything, the trend to be noted by the types of contemporary art exhibitions being presented nowadays, shows an effort to be more popular, more entertainment oriented, more accessible to casual art audiences. The widely recognized work of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are just the most widely noted confirmations of this turn to the popular in late modernism.
Actually, today's artists are better educated across the arts and humanities than ever before. Some of them are well educated in the hard sciences, too. That's partly due to the dissolving of traditional boundaries in all fields. If you read contemporary art criticism and look at the careers of artists who curate exhibitions and lead university programs and who publish frequently in peer reviewed journals, you will note the extraordinary breadth of artists'intellectual contributions today. For instance, I, too muddled for Cheerskep, once read a paper (re G. Seurat) at the American Psychological Association Conference in Chicago. It was well received by professional psychologists and psychoanalysts. Many other artists have done much more. Frankly, Cheerskep, and possibly you as well, have antiquated and romaticized views of artists and their work. That is partly due, perhaps, to the fact that most of the artists here are rather conservative in their views and practices. Actually, the bad effect of socialst propaganda art is not all still bad. Under the Socialist regimes artists were prodded and pushed to engage in practical applied arts, like theater design, weaving, other crafts. Today's art scene is burgeoning with new work that questions and blurs the old distinctions among the crafts and between them and the traditional fine arts. Some of that new creativity stems from the art mandates of the socialist era. WC
