I was hoping that the art scene in Japan would be as highly developed as the music scene there, but I haven’t seen anything like that yet.
Discussion
I see a lot of restoration efforts to repair traditional temples and temple art, but very very little that merges old and new. There’s hyper-modern video games and anime, centuries-old crafts and ceremonial art, but it’s hard to find something new in physical mediums.
What cities or towns in the world are you most impressed by?
As a city the one that sticks out is Vancouver because of a massive amount of training that goes on with indigenous artists (I’ve looked mainly at Haida or Tsimshian traditions). Either woodcarving or engraved jewelry, but they work in many other mediums too. Otherwise the pattern that I see is some lone genius that is in a major city by themselves, such as the iconographers Yury Yarin in Moscow or Anthony Gunin in Boston. But they’re all coming from cultures with longstanding traditions of art and building off of that.
I definitely do not have a comprehensive view of what’s going on though, basically I’ve taken a bucket of water out of the ocean and examined it with a microscope. There’s a million other things out there that I don’t even know how to search for.