I could spend hours giving examples of the invention of new forms of abstract graphics, since you find similar trends in many fields.
I personally find the lessons from the history of image-making pretty compelling. But when I gave a version of this talk to my graduate students, they didn?t buy it. They wanted rational ?reasons? why abstract images are better than realistic images.
To answer that question, let me try to answer a complex question: What?s a good image?