Just a little note re: piss people off manifesto (which rocks): I disagree that looking at still life or portrait in the various academic styles is just looking at someone skillfully replicating reality. They didn't, it's still hella stylized, and it's pretty much as custom-made and as translated THROUGH the artist as a modern non-figurative work or a clearly non-realistic impressionist painting. All these paintings TRICK us into believing they're something like "imperfect photographs", slavish attempts to mimic reality; they're not, even if some teachers back then stated as much. These paiting are as individual and interpretational as any other handmade art (and, well, good photographs). There are heaps of deliberate, meaningful choices and lucky accidents all converging into an object that you can look at for like 15 minutes as if talking to it — photographs are not the same, you can't mine so much manual decisions even from a genius photograph. Granted, it's harder to get pissed off at one of those. And they were made with less focus on that. But that's actually an interesting topic because they COULD very well piss off some contemporaries, we just can't understand the details and hints and references, like we miss most small references in even 19th c lit.
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Thank you for the insightful reply! I knew I was being kind of glib & dismissive to classical painting when I wrote the notecard...but like you mentioned I think the average person who is going to an art museum and getting mad at abstract art is not thinking this in-depth about the classical stuff in order to defend it - it "deserves" to be "art" more because it's instantly recognizable. I do enjoy when you can see the presence of more interpretive aspects in any painting (The Ambassadors comes to mind as an obvious example).