Modern art sucks, and I'll tell you why.

I can remember the first painting I ever saw that stopped me dead in my tracks. It grabbed me by the curly short hairs of my visual cortex, gave them a powerful shake, and said Pay attention! There is more here than meets the eye. A small, painfully slim figure lies in at the edge of a great tan field, a country house in the distance, beneath a lowering sky. I was seven, and the painting was Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth.
That painting awoke in me a realization that you could tell an entire life story in one image, a story of courage and pain, hope and loss, determination and struggle. One image, immediately accessible, instantly understood.
I grew up in rural New Brunswick, and I knew fields like that (actually, the farm is a real place, and was only a couple hundred miles away in Maine). The sense of place in the painting was astounding to me. I could smell the dry grass around her, I could feel the roughness of the soil under her hands, I could hear the distant slap of the barn door closing - all from an image created by rubbing colored mud onto a flat surface with small hairy sticks. It was magical. I needed to know how the artist had done it.
Over the next few years, I devoured every art book that was in our local small town library (along with all their dinosaur books and every episode of Danny Dunn). I discovered much more Wyeth, both Andrew and his father, as well as Titian, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Velázquez and many of the Old Masters. Frazetta was still a few years away for me, but I was also drawn to the works of Maxfield Parrish, whose heightened reality and technical perfection still amaze me.
I could see that Wyeth and Parrish were the modern descendants of a great artistic tradition. They had learned all the skills of the Old Masters, combined them with a greater appreciation for the natural world and, (freed from a need to incorporate religious iconography into every image), they set out to depict and exalt the human experience. Painting, which once only depicted flying saints and glowing Christs, could now be used to show the courage and dignity of a simple woman, crippled by polio.

This is what Art should be, I decided. This is how I will learn to paint. There could be no finer goal than to master the ability to create a new reality, to use this media to exalt courage and human dignity, to show the way forward, to lift up the human spirit.

Boy, was I in for a surprise.
It turns out, that Wyeth, Parrish, Rockwell, Erte, Mucha, et al were not considered real artists - they're only illustrators. The real Artists (with a capital A) are above such petty concerns as being technically proficient and easily understandable. The new Modern art world, (which was sadly well established before I was born), would be inherited by the dribblers, those artists who created works whose (alleged) artistic merits were A) - inversely proportionate to the amount of skill needed to create them, and B) - directly proportionate to the amount of explanation they needed in order to be understood. Great technical virtuosity, and an incredible ability to communicate complex ideas to every person with eyes, has given way to the spastic spatterings of paint and the abstruse interpretations of Pollock and his imitators.

A bit harsh, you say? Consider the next image - 1 panel was painted by a man (a recognized Genius of Modern Art), 1 panel was painted by a chimpanzee and 1 was painted by an elephant. See if you can tell the difference. Here's a hint: the elephant's painting is upside down.


Let's see a monkey paint the Mona Lisa, and I'll give Modern Art another chance.