Why do so many people hate modern art?

Why do many of us hate modern and contemporary art with such a passion? Here's an article that quite reasonably finds the cause mostly in that this "art" is the product of the despair of nihilistic materialism, and decadence, that afflict modern society or at least the cultural intellectual elite, the "intelligentsia".  It is at least arguable that this analysis also applies in part to the path of modern and contemporary "classical" music and much of popular music.  

Some good excerpts:

“The stem word of ‘art’ is Latin ars, skill. Art is the mirror of the soul of the artist, the society, the culture which has produced it. A beautiful soul produces beautiful art, a harmonous soul produces harmonous art, a hideous soul produces hideous art, a broken soul produces broken art. ….. Everything boils down to the three basic values: truth, goodness and beauty. ….Why is modern art hideous? Because modern art is basically the break-off from Classical ideas and challenging the natural concept of beauty. The Classical and Medieval periods equated beauty with goodness, and Godhead; the art was to reach for the divine and the capture the God’s image within us.

...Came the 19th century, photography, Freud, Nietzsche, Atheism, evolution theory and Socialism. Humans no more were the images of God, but animals among animals. Psychology came up with the idea that we are animals psychologically as well as biologically: that culture and civilization is merely a surface treatment over the urges, instincts and drives of an animal, a predator, a beast, and that we consciously perceive is merely the tip of the iceberg under the unconscious.
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So the artist was no more to capture the world as it is: photography would do it. Art would no more be about reaching the divine within us, because God was dead. The art would no more be about idealizing the things, but rather digging up the beast within us. Art became no more to paint what you see or what you imagine, but what you feel.

And the universal feeling was anxiety and emptiness. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world’s sense of anxiety had become a full-blown distress. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity, optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared. One of the three profound basic values, beauty, was nullified.
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Modern art became completely unhinged after the World War One. The reason is that many of the artists had been conscripted in the armies as soldiers, and they came home with the sensitive artist’s soul broken and shattered. Dada was the first truly insane form of art. Dada manifested the complete irrationality and madness of the world. Marcel Duchamp bought a pissoir in a hardware store, put it upon a plinth and named it The Fountain; the critics claimed it was art.

After Dada nothing has been the same. Almost all styles and movements after Dada have been ugly, hideous, mad, unbalanced, disharmonous and trivial.

….the grand audience has not been amused. They see Modern and Contemporary art merely as fraud: something which they pay with their taxes and something which the artists use to cheat their living on the expense of the audience and to fund their alcohol and cocaine habits. And not necessarily without grounds.

….the evolution of the Modern art and the contemporary art can be also seen as the decay of the soul of the Western culture and its slow decline and descent from the torchbearer of humankind into a complete Nihilistic madness. Little by little beginning from 1870s the art has become more trivial, more insane, more schizophrenic. If and when the art is the mirror of the soul of the culture which has created it, then the Western soul is empty.
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The Western culture has reached its evolutionary dead end on its self-inflicted Nihilism: its soul is dead, void and empty.”

It lacks depth, elegance, significance... Its pretentious... Many reasons to hate it. 

Why? That is a different question... Maybe because the vast majority of "art" is now done with the idea of appealing to others, rather than expressing oneself? When you are tied to the "meaning" that others must understand, you lose the capacity of understanding your own.

I can only speak for myself because art is essentially subjective in its appreciation. I much prefer impressionism over realism but detest much of what came after the impressionists. Here are a couple of examples of the kind of painting I love and abhor. 



Next some work that I can't, for the life of me, understand how it can be considered great art (click for larger image) ...

   


https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63...rer=artist

The degeneration of art:

This is “Royal Red and Blue” by Mark Rothko. It's supposed to be worth about $75 million.

I look at that and think: I could have done that. A child could have done that. It is a simple pattern that has no discernible emotional meaning as far as I am concerned. It produces no emotional reaction other than disgust at the decadence of an art world that sells such stuff (and even worse) at such prices. I'm sure some art critic could come up with a quite elaborate rationalization, but it would be ridiculous. I just thought of something: maybe the artist did have a certain meaning in mind - to create in the viewer the impression of meaninglessness and emptiness. He succeeded at that and would be creative genius if it weren't that legions of previous modern and contemporary artists have already gone there and done that.



This is Gainsborough's "Blue Boy". To see the original in person is to gaze into the eyes of a marvelous artifice that creates the impression of a living being from a past era dead and gone looking out at you.

Case closed. 

Modern art is lacking in meaning.

Art is supposed to be about expressing emotions through symbolic art ~ a picture paints a thousand words, after all, as the saying goes.

If modern art is hated ~ the crappiness of the art speaks for itself.

The degeneration of art:

This is “Royal Red and Blue” by Mark Rothko. It's supposed to be worth about $75 million.

I look at that and think: I could have done that. A child could have done that. It is a simple pattern that has no discernible emotional meaning as far as I am concerned. It produces no emotional reaction other than disgust at the decadence of an art world that sells such stuff (and even worse) at such prices. I'm sure some art critic could come up with a quite elaborate rationalization, but it would be ridiculous. I just thought of something: maybe the artist did have a certain meaning in mind - to create in the viewer the impression of meaninglessness and emptiness. He succeeded at that and would be creative genius if it weren't that legions of previous modern and contemporary artists have already gone there and done that.



This is Gainsborough's "Blue Boy". To see the original in person is to gaze into the eyes of a marvelous artifice that creates the impression of a living being from a past era dead and gone looking out at you.

Case closed. 

Art has to be considered in context. I’d have the Gainsborough on the wall of my country estate, and the Rothko in my city penthouse.

I often wonder why art history books will always contain at least one Jackson Pollock and nowadays, possibly a Tracy Emming, but never a Boris Valejo.  Just arty-farty pretention!

Art has to be considered in context. I’d have the Gainsborough on the wall of my country estate, and the Rothko in my city penthouse.

Put the Rothko up next to the enthroned can of a great departed modern artist's excrement. I guess the penthouse will be a sort of mini museum of modern art.

Next some work that I can't, for the life of me, understand how it can be considered great art (click for larger image) ...




https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63...rer=artist

Breathtaking. It's worth looking at the complete portfolio:
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/po...&direction=

Breathtaking. It's worth looking at the complete portfolio:
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/po...&direction=

Yeah, the reason I picked that one was because I happened to go to the Guggenheim during a short visit to New York a couple of years ago and they had an exhibition of her work. To be honest, I looked at one and wondered if it was a sheet ripped from a lined paper exercise pad. Another looked like a sheet of graph paper. Sorry, but I just don't get it.