Crisis and Art

The artist's need to make original art and the commerical need to escape crisis are directly related.

Based on the 2008 debut albums of Rihanna and Gaga, two aesthetically strange phenomena produced by the fusion of corporate culture and art that is the mainstream,  versus the previous 10 years of pop-cultural sameness, economic crisis has been good for Western Art because it made corporations and audiences look for a new artistic solution, a new perspective to replace ways of thinking that clearly didn't benefit them, and brought them economic failure.

Likewise, within the European Avant-Garde new ideas wouldn't have existed without the dynamic post-WWI, post-Depression crisis environment. In fact some (surrealism, futurism) developed elements in  response to war (Guernica, . Picasso was anti-war, Dali was pro-war, but the point was they lived in distressing times, and had opinions on them that fueled their  imperative to innovate.

This means that artistic revolution isn't as linked to technology and fashion as some suggest: it's linked to the capital needs of the collective and to factors beyond our control.

You could say that industrialism and positive economic growth were as much a part of artisitc succes, but that wasn't true, the 1950s and 1990s were periods of American hegemony and economic wealth that seemed stymed, cloistered, repressed artistically in the US.