- For the longest time art was mostly involved with taking a three dimensional scene and capturing it in a two dimensional surface. - With the advent of photos our ability to capture a scene evolved to a more realistic depiction than art could ever match. - This lead to artists trying to innovate and the purpose of art began to change. ---- At the time Turner was painting the remarkable Snowstorm, photography was beginning to revolutionize our ability to capture a view of the world and convert it to a two-dimensional surface. During the Renaissance, Western painting evolved to a progressively more realistic depiction of the world. — painting lost what Ernst Gombrich called its “unique ethological niche” in the world of depiction. This prompted a search for alternative niches, one of which was greater abstraction. --[[Reductionism in Art and Brain Science]]