> The portion of art devoted to representations not attached to aesthetic beauty before the 20th century is very small (at least, what i've been exposed to). I'm not all that familiar with styles of visual art, so i have to stick with talking aobut music.


I'm not contradicting you necessarily, I'm just providing some counterexamples:

In the early middle ages, before the exquisite Gothic cathedrals we usually think of, they decorated churches with all sorts of ugly, distorted figures: demons, portrayals of the judgement of souls, etc. The figures are unattractive and even silly-looking. Some of that lived on in gargoyles. There, the ideal was not to make something of beauty, but to tell a story, portray a truth apart from aesthetic considerations.
In early, pre-classic Greece, there was a focus on geometry and regularity-- the figures, again, were rather silly-looking. You might call regularity a kind of beauty, but my understanding is that they were not interested in aesthetic appeal so much as representing order and stability in a world that had just come out of a few centuries of chaos.

There are other examples, but my point is that art, through history, has been about many things other than beauty. The pattern seems to be that when a civilization is at its height, beauty (by a fairly basic, traditional definition) is the most important factor in the artworks produced. When a civilization is rising or falling, expressions of other things take primary importance-- telling a story or bringing order out of chaos, to name two. I'll leave others to speculate about what this means for us. We are, however, the first society I'm aware of to be highly interested in expressions of insanity and meaninglessness.

Lire"waiting for some art history major to correct me on every single thing I've said"lyn