As an evolutionary biologist and a jazz musician, I would say that Darwinism is a metaphor that is ubiquitous and certainly does apply to art. For example, there is a crucible of ideas, and certain ideas that don't "work" within a particular framework of expression cannot compete against ideas that do "work", and the latter come to predominate. What "works" might be a decision made by a single artist, or it might be a result of synergism with other artists, and it may be conscious or unconscious.
And I think you can use the term "evolution" within the context of art. For example, a single individual might evolve through several phases, each one informed by the one previous, so that there is a definite direction of "development" that can be perceived and analyzed. And you can expand that idea outward from a single individual to a group of interacting artists, who synergistically might develop or "evolve" a kind of expression through several intermediate stages. New stages may be coincident with new ideas ("innovations") that change the way we perceive the art and require development of new kinds of expression, that usually contain remnants of the previous.
Whether there was "progress" along that line of development is a separate issue that is not contained within the idea of "evolution" itself.
Or to put it more simply, Darwinian evolution says nothing about progress. It simply is a theory of adaptive change. Adaptive change is everywhere in living things, in the short term, long term, and all levels of biological organization. Artists certainly undergo adaptive change. In fact if they did not, then one could probably say that their particular art is "dead". Now there's another biological metaphor
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