It helps to contextualize this work in the movement it was part of: Dada. After the invention of photography the fine arts community was dealing with a crisis: painting was the primary form of art, and painting was meant to capture reality faithfully. Photography turns that on it's head and we get the beginnings of modern art with the Ashcan school in 1900 which makes everyday life, including the lives of the less fortunate, an acceptable subject of painting (previously it was nearly all portraiture, landscape and scenes from history or fiction).

Less representative paintings give way to abstract art, and just 19 years later we see that artists are pushing the bounds of what is considered "art". Duchamp and company were asking the question of "what is art" with each new piece and the overall movement of Data and it's descendants such as Fluxus has investigated that boundary for more than 100 years.

that's a good point. the words traditional being a direct contradiction to modernism didn't occur to me until reading this comment.

I don't know if it's possible to rename lemmy communities (since you'd have to change the url of the community, and if I only change the display name of the community, the discrepancy between that and the real name might be confusing)

but if it was possible to truly rename this community I'd want a name that emphasizes what the community IS rather than what it isn't (i'm against names like NON-digital_art or NON-ai_art) but at the same time it's hard to find an umbrella term that includes all art but explicitly excludes the digital medium (maybe Physical_art? I don't know if that's better or worse than Traditional_art.)