My own training leads me to prefer a picture that is “saccharine” or “sentimental”—that is, one that depicts actual human emotions and situations—executed with a correct understanding of anatomy, light, perspective, and paint technique, as opposed to pointless blobs of color thrown at a canvas for the purpose of exploiting rich, ignorant people. Tom Wolfe had it right about modern art. After hearing some of Picasso’s extremely cynical remarks about how he had ripped people off with his own work, I have zero faith that modern art conceals treasures of hidden meaning that ordinary people are just too too unsophisticated to understand.
I agree with much of what you say but it’s more case by case for me. Picasso’s Blue Period paintings are full of emotion and meaning, as are Matisse’s deceptively simple collages, and Tom Wolfe—whose book on modern art I loved—had no beef with those works. On the other hand, Art Renewal fave Bougereau’s paintings have in them, for me, nothing that remotely resembles “actual human emotion”; his skillfully drawn but ultimately lifeless figures are as far from the real thing—Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Titian—as the emptiest abstract art. Also, interestingly, Art Renewal entirely leaves Impressionism out of the equation—they make no mention of the staggering works of Monet or Van Gogh or Manet, which remain the most popular art in the world. I’ve written to ask them about that but I’ve never gotten an answer.