I once lucked into a private tour of a Monet gallery. I asked the curator, "these paintings just don't look great, why should I be impressed?"

The curator responded that Monet, and impressionism in general, were a reaction to the then-new invention of paint sold in tubes. Previously a painter had to mix pigment powder right when they painted. So they usually couldn't paint outdoors where the wind would blow the powder, and they couldn't capture rapidly-evolving scenes.

Tube paint changed that. Impressionists started painting things in motion, or in shifting lighting like dawn. Their paintings were designed not to look good close up, but to be viewed at a distance, where the "pixelation" (so to speak) resolved into a coherent picture. They skipped on fine detail to capture something as fast as they could, because they could never do that before.

I still don't care for impressionism on an aesthetic level, but I learned something that day about art history and why some people appreciate art that I don't.