Modern art. Some of it is great, some of it is museum worthy, and some of it should go back to the trash can it came from. I can certainly appreciate contemporary artists such as Picasso and Salvador Dalí. However, I will never get behind artists like Micheal Rothko, who paints canvases with two or three colors and doesn’t bother to name anything, then sold a two-color painting for nearly eighty-seven million dollars. Or Agnes Martin’s Untitled number twelve, which is a blank canvas with some pencil lines. To not name one’s own art gives the impression that the artist just doesn’t care. Of course, sometimes there’s a reason for this. But, sometimes, a simplistic painting that lacks a name is displayed in a museum, and I cannot in good conscience call something that shows so little effort a piece of art. If there’s one thing I will use to define art, it’s effort. Lack of effort means lack of care. Lack of care means lack of meaning. A simple splatter or square of paint without a name is not art. 

There are other pieces of “art” that don’t seem to have a known meaning. Lever number one, a sculpture by Martin Puryear, is nothing more than a weirdly shaped hunk of wood. The description of the piece by The Art Institute of Chicago suggests that it has a variety of meanings, including a coffin, a boat, or the process of making art, as there are still glue and staples on the surface. Supposed “art experts” can’t even seem to determine a general meaning behind this warped wood floor. There’s another sculpture called Woman with Dog. It’s a woman and dog made out of very large, fake seashells. I built an owl out of seashells once, does it belong in a museum? 

To be quite honest, I believe that “art” like this is created by people who think they’re pushing the boundaries of art, then a bunch of rich people pretend to know what it means and pay absurd sums of money for these creations. There is a plain red canvas called Blood Red Mirror by Gerhard Richter. It has one color on it. It sold for over a million dollars. Of all the things you can do with a million dollars, why spend it on a plain red canvas? Then there’s Jackson Pollock. If he only made one or two of his drip paintings, I could understand a few hundred thousand dollars for his art. But, his drip painting Number Seventeen A, likely because it was featured in Life Magazine, sold for two hundred million dollars. An extremely similar painting, Number 5, was sold for one-hundred and forty million dollars. Money can be spent on anything. It could be spent on something charitable, or a mansion, or a sports car, or whatever you may want. But of all the things in the world money could be spent on, what sane person spends it on this? Some modern art, as I said, is meaningful. But, too much of it is nothing more than overpriced paint on a canvas.