Our response to artistic technique is human nature...

...and therefore art based on technique will be timeless, but our response to conceptual art is not. New Zealander, Dennis Dutton, explains how conceptual art, with its concept-maker disconnected from it's fabricator, has "jumped the shark tank" by ignoring our "direct response" to skill.

Excerpt below:

"...We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. [...] Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity."

Dutton, D. "Has conceptual art jumped the shark tank?" Op/Ed in New York Times. October 15, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opinion/16dutton.html