A seminal piece of modern art is Duchamps urinal. Apparently, there was a big exhibition in Paris in the early 20th century, and the organizers were a bit snooty, but tried to be progressive, so there were no rules for this exhibition, anything can be art (context: art was at the time narrowly defined as paintings of identifiable subjects in gilded frame, or something like that). Duchamp supposed they weren't totally earnest about that, so he bought a urinal, signed it and submitted it, and sure enough, the organizers rejected it as "not art". He trolled them. Cool, exposing the hipocrites, big deal at the time.

But time has more than caught up with this gag. Exposing hipocrisy today is totally run of the mill, literally daily fare in news, comedy, whatever.

This leaves us with people paying $20 to visit a the MOMA and look solemnly at a 100 year old urinal that has literally zero inherent artistic qualities. That belong in a history museum, not an art museum. Perhaps modern art museums should be understood more as an art history museum, we're there because it feels significant to be physically near a historically significant object, not to enjoy any inherent qualities of the object.

2. It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper. This would likely be more obvious if we lived in a visually-based society and not a linguistic-based one.

Is there a name for the specific kind of modern art that has red canvases, soup cans, and splatter-painting as central examples? I'd be glad to change my usage if there were a clearer term.

> Not to mention that modern != contemporary.

I'm not sure what you mean here; I was using "modern art" to refer specifically to the works of the Modern Art movement—which tended to have a lot of 'scribble-drawings'—rather than more generally to "art made in modern times."

> It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper.

This is silly; a book can tell you a story without you needing to know anything about the time and place the book was written in. You need to know the language of the book, yes, but a book with a considerate author will often subtly teach you any jargon it uses, or the significance of cultural signifiers it refers to, etc. This is why outsider protagonists in fiction are so common.

And this is also the point of "annotated editions" of books: authors tend to write assuming their audience will understand their own current cultural milieu, but not that of other cultures or eras. A text that comes from another culture has no value to a layperson from outside that culture, until it is annotated with enough context to make it accessible.

Modern art (or whatever you'd call the subset of the movement that has scribble-drawings as its central referent) is not self-contained in this way, in the sense that people don't expect or require modern art to build in a lens for interpreting it, to consider it "good."

In a world without the "people like owning signed copies of things" effect, I'd expect art that is meaningless without inaccessible-to-laymen cultural context to mostly fail, in the same way unannotated books from foreign cultures fail; and I'd expect such works to succeed exactly to the degree to which the author—or an intermediate, such as a museum curator—went to the effort to create a more complete work that contains both the piece and its cultural context. You know: really long wall tags. Or a documentary video playing beside the exhibited piece.

You do see these, but not very often. Why? Because "art lovers" value being the ones to explain the cultural context to their friends, and value works (and curatory paradigms) that enable this, by avoiding annotation and leaving the works illegible. Thus neatly explaining how the scribble-drawings cluster of works ever achieved popularity at all. "Art snobs", who enjoy—to coin a phrase—artsplaining.

No, because there is no broad "type" that does such things.

I'm not sure what you mean here; I was using "modern art" to refer specifically to the works of the Modern Art movement—which tended to have a lot of 'scribble-drawings'—rather than more generally to "art made in modern times."

I'm not sure how you are aware of the Modern Art movement but somehow equate it to scribble drawings. You consider Picasso's work to be "scribble drawings"? Art made in the past ±30 years is not considered "modern art", it is considered "contemporary art." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art

This is silly; a book can tell you a story without you needing to know anything about the time and place the book was written in. You need to know the language of the book, yes, but a book with a considerate author will often subtly teach you any jargon it uses, or the significance of cultural signifiers it refers to, etc. This is why outsider protagonists in fiction are so common.

You're missing my point. The language of the book (English) corresponds to the language of art. A lot of contemporary art is a reaction to things within its own field and cannot be really understood without understanding its context. If you don't understand its context (and have a hostile "they're just art snobs" attitude toward it) then no, you probably won't appreciate it. Not to mention the fact that again, contemporary art is truly a massive field filled with every possible variety of artist and intent, ranging from political statements to pure works of craftsmanship, and everything in between.

Ultimately, contemporary art has its own vocabulary. If you don't bother to learn it, don't expect to understand it. Furthermore, understanding a piece doesn't mean you like it or think it's a good piece of art. Whether contemporary artists should or should not aim to have their work intelligible to laymen is another question entirely.

I.e., modern art is valuable in part because people will go to art galleries and museums to stare at denotationally-valueless art if it gives them an excuse to talk/think about art history. Art galleries and museums are willing to buy those pieces to capture that foot-traffic, which gives a price to the pieces.

You do realize you're a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, right?