I think there are some works that are agreeable to look at. But I don't think any of it can be compared to real art. I think there are some comic book illustrators that deserve to be recognised a lot more than any abstract artist.
This post was edited by winston degaulle at January 20, 2018 9:02 PM MST
I'm prefer art by the Impressionists. A tree should look like a tree - brown bark, green leaves, not black paint slapped on a canvas that could be done by a child.
I am very fond of some of it. I especially like when I can imagine what might have been abstracted from the original idea or drawings based on the artist's name for the piece.
I can appreciate it more if I can see that some skill and effort has gone into it, but like Nevan B, I think some of the more way-out material is just charlatanism.
I remember once hearing on the radio, the art-critic Brain Sewell - he of Pronunciation so Received and the effrontery of taste so effortless that he's almost beyond parody - dismiss some painting or other as, "It's a nice picture - but of course, it's not art!"
IIE (NO), I do not care for it. Salvador Dali the great Surrealist from Spain said that the best art is the most realistic. He rates some painters from different periods and concludes that Jan Vermeer van Delft was the greatest painter in history. Modern artists are more con artists than skillful painters. Their work looks childish to an objective person. They utter nonsense to excuse their lack of talent, and gullible people are deceived. Paul Harvey reported that Pablo Picasso admitted that he was a mountebank selling trash to fools. That sums it up for Modern Art (?) Immature eccentricity replaces originality, and obscurantism replaces profundity. Abstract rt is rubbish. Hopefully, there will be a Neo Renaissance soon. We are in another Dark Ages in painting.
When I toured an art museum I happened to see a version of "The Night Watch" done in neon colors and generally looking like a Scooby Doo cartoon. Millions of people spend money to travel to museums to see the original painting, and millions of people watch the tv show and quote that stupid dog in casual conversation. (That's the one that says "Rut ro!")
So how do you say that one is art and the other is not? At the time I could not understand why the artist bothered to paint such a thing. It has taken me twenty years to draw a connection between an old painting and a stupid tv show. So the question remains unanswered: "What is art and why should we care?"
What is art? I don't think you'd ever get a simple straightforward answer apart from a direct dictionary definition! :-)
Why... care? It'd be a dull world without! The likes of the Taliban might think that good, but no-one with any humanity or creativity in his or her soul would.
Benedict Arnold 
