[Aquinasfan]

How about artists like Whistler, Turner, Henry Moore, Gauguin, Edward Weston, Richard Estes, Dali, etc. etc.? You do know they, among others, are all considered modernists

You know the ones I'm talking about. The ones who couldn't draw so they came up with a scam, like Picasso, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Calder, Miro, Klee, Haring, Johns, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Modigliani and the biggest joke of them all, Rothko.

[macamadamia]

A list of artists you believe “couldn’t draw” is not a definition of modern art. Your qualifiers undermine your statement that modern art is worthless. I’m more on the same page with you than you think. But, you simply can’t lump all of these artists together. Picasso, Pollock, Kandinsky, Miro, Mondrian, Klee, for example, sure as hell could draw; have you seen their early work? There’s no scam going on—this is a ridiculous assertion. They simply rejected their early styles, arrived at new ones and found admirers. Where’s the deception. I get queasy looking at a Thomas Kincaid, but I wouldn’t for a second accuse him of pulling a scam simply because he found an audience. Also, it is wrong to speak about modern art as if it were monolithic. It simply isn’t—there never was a unified aesthetic and scholars can’t even agree upon a definition of “modernism.” It’s a knee jerk reaction to dismiss anything you don’t like as “modern art” unless you can provide a comprehensive definition of modernism that everyone else seems to be struggling with. The problem IMO is that art history scholars think that they’re scientists and hence believe they can impose a nifty taxonomy upon all this cultural stuff that simply cannot be categorized. Also, I assume that you don’t believe that art museums are sanctified spaces and that curators are high priests. Its all marketing, sometimes offensive sometimes palatable, but where’s the scam?