There has been nostalgia about the art of yesteryear for about as long as there have been multiple artworks to compare to one other. The Roman architect Vitruvius (the mind behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man), writing in the first century BCE, vastly preferred Greek styling to that of his contemporaries. However, for the most part, until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the population would have likely been very much satisfied with what they saw artists of their time producing. Art was a much stronger reflector of popular tastes than it is today, and of the paradigmatic shifts in society.

To more accurately formulate an idea of how people throughout history might have viewed art, we need to recognise that the concept of art movements as we know it came about in the eighteenth century, most notably in 1764 by Johann Winckelmann, who in his book The History of Art in Antiquity was the first to put a name to specifically Greek styles. Prior to this point, there was relatively little distinction among discrete art movements; however, the first recorded use of the term ‘Renaissance’ is in the writings of Giorgio Vasari in 1550, and refers to the rebirth of Italian art - inspired by the art of antique Greece - with artists like Giotto and Cimabue, after the perceived barbaries of the art styles that had emerged after the fall of the Roman empire. Terms like ‘Gothic’ and ’the Dark Ages’ were used by later historians to disparage those eras in history; until quite recently (Jacob Burckhardt wrote to this effect in 1860), the Renaissance was viewed as a massive sea change from a stagnant, unremarkable time into a shining modern era.

The Renaissance was marked by a period of rediscovery of antique Greek and Roman texts, such as De rerum natura (1st century BCE), a poem by the Roman philosophical poet Lucretius expounding upon the philosophies of the earlier Greek philosopher Epicurus, found in a remote monastery by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini in 1414. As such, there was a vogue for antique art during that period, however, it was obtainable only scarcely and at high cost; Michelangelo got his start as a sculptor by faking Roman marbles, which impressed the buyers so much upon discovery that they were indeed fake that he attracted the attention of patrons throughout the upper echelons of Italian society. Somewhat more accessible were syncretistic, romanticised images of antique life, viewed through a Renaissance lens; this is what we see with artworks like The Birth of Venus. When we look at Renaissance art, we are looking at what was commissioned by a wealthy patron or by the Catholic church, and therefore it reflects what was most popular at the time. Religion played an extremely important part in determining the what sort of art was popular at the time; in Catholic Italy, elaborate frescoes and murals were more popular than they were further north, where art was more conservative.

The Council of Trent (1545-63) was a massive turning point in the art market, which allows us to gain a much clearer understanding of especially the broader public's tastes in art. The Council of Trent removed a great deal of purchasing power from the Catholic Church, meaning that artists had to turn to other sources of income in order to get by. In prosperous communities, art was no longer accessible merely to the nobility and the extremely wealthy, but as well to the even simply moderately wealthy, such as bureaucrats; at one point during the Dutch Golden Age, two-thirds of homes in Delft contained artwork. Thousands, possibly millions of pieces were produced, by artists like Rubens as well as thousands of lesser-known artists trying to capitalise upon the popularity of Rubens’ work. The common threads among artworks in this region and time were history paintings (typically the most time-consuming and expensive; these remained solidly in the hands of the wealthiest commissioners), portraits (also time-consuming and expensive), landscapes and still-lives (the least expensive and most widely available, sometimes even as prints). Because artists had to make their work commercially viable during this time, we have an excellent perspective, at least from extant works, of what the popular tastes were.

Popular taste began to diverge from ‘contemporary art’ toward the end of the nineteenth century, beginning as far as I’m concerned with the feud in the 1860s and 1870s between John Ruskin and James Abbott McNeill Whistler; Ruskin, very much a part of the academic system, believed Whistler’s paintings to have no artistic merit, and Whistler subsequently sued him for libel. As the century wore on, the Impressionist school started to gain a foothold; with the development of photography and cinema, the focus in art shifted from accurate representations to more expressive, abstracted forms, with the emphasis less on what was being depicted and more on how.

The true schism between popular perception of good art and the reality of most contemporary art began to occur, at least in my opinion as an art market analyst, with the economic booms of the 1980s, allowing many people to become phenomenally rich; there is an extremely limited field of Old Masters to be bought, and getting more limited by the auction, as choice pieces are picked off by museums. However, the contemporary art field continues to grow, with artists like Hirst and Koons producing artworks at a number that qualifies them as a luxury good, rather than a pure artwork. The increasing parity between the availability of a Van Gogh poster and one of Koons’ balloon dogs, for example, leads to an alienation of the general populace.

This is a very rambling but very broad overview, I haven't even gone into things like the particular art culture of China, which is completely different.