Cicero --
I share your doubts about High Modernism and never cared much for the Abstract Expressionists. Still, about 15 years ago my father -- a retired steelworker with a high school education -- visited NYC and I took him to MOMA. All art was new to him. He wasn't impressed with the water lillies. But LOVED the Pollacks. He saw the one that used to hang in the hallway near the escalator and exclaimed, "Now, there's a painting." It made me think that there might be something to Pollack after all.
Yes, there's a lot of energy in the Pollacks. And I can see why people like them in their strange fashion. But I find myself increasingly impatient with the whole modernist gang, especially in music and art. In literature, I like Joyce and Eliot, though they both have problems, and I love Yeats and Stevens.
But Schoenberg? Music went to the dogs with the modernists.
Picasso was one of the most talented modernists. He was a great artist in some ways. But his work is cruel, brutal, and artistically immoral. Great talent put to destructive use.