I don’t get modern art. I dont understand how we went from beautiful paintings to a yellow pentagon with a black line through it being considered art.
This is from Burghley House near where I live. And it’s obviously taken a lot of thought, skill and talent to create.
This is from an art gallery I took my wife to yesterday. And as far as I can tell, it’s complete crap. If my kids handed this to me as their art homework I’d be having words with them.
Obviously I kept my mouth shut as the museum guides seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. And this was about my wife after all, it’s not about me. Happily over drinks later it turned out she thought the same but enjoyed watching me hum thoughtfully at each piece while failing to hide my utter contempt for what I was seeing.
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I think what you’re seeing with modern art is actually part of a cycle rather than just “decay.” Every art form tends to whittle down to its basics after a while, because the complexities have already been explored. Themes change, audiences change, and what’s considered meaningful or “good” shifts with them.
Take music for example, we moved from the harmonic density of jazz and the orchestral tradition into the more repetitive, groove-driven forms of pop, hip hop, and R&B. That doesn’t mean today’s music has no value, it just emphasizes accessibility, rhythm, and production instead of complexity in harmony. The same thing happens across all art, once the difficult heights are reached, there’s always a swing back toward simpler, more relatable expressions.
Complexity never disappears, it just moves into niches while the mainstream goes broad. So modern art isn’t really the death of art, it’s just the latest stage in that ongoing cycle.
