It's not a deep emotion, of course, it's a fleeting sensation, really, like smelling a flower or listening to a "boop boop" sound effect on the tram. It's a trite emotion, which is the best way to describe the reaction I get to Pollock - trite.
I think that particular Pollock piece would make for a great panel or wallpaper in a basement. There's a certain movement and a not-unpleasant interplay with the colors - again, similar to the "boop, boop" on various public transportation system sound effects.
You can call it "art" sure, I think "craft" would be better, or perhaps "decorative arts" is probably the best way to describe Pollock. I recall a youtube video of the painting of a countertop in a kind of "hip, modern" kitchen that had a similar aesthetic.
Of course those Soviet paintings of WWI are far more meaningful than Pollack's visually not-unpleasant background color mix.
This game is silly. Denigrating a work of art for being different from another work of art is not critique, it is bitterness. Life is short. Speak up for the beautiful things you understand, not against the things you don't understand.
Reguarding the representation of war, I’m afraid 200-year old paintings don’t do it for me anymore, modern warfare is so much more different and more atrocious and industrialized compared to how things happened two or three centuries ago that we do need the power of art to make us, humans, help us understand at least some part of it all. I pretty much admire the new-Hollywood directors who had the guts to put on screen what the Vietnam war meant for all those involved, from the local Vietnamese population to the US soldiers to the relatives of the US soldiers at home. For comparison the Iraqi and the Afghan wars were pretty much invisible for today’s artists, with notable and very few exceptions (like Brian de Palma).
If any notable art came out of the Iraqi wars it is probably hanging in Baghdad, we might find out about it eventually.
In the same way that Mao era paintings are valuable in understanding the history of early communist China, I believe the ISIS videos will be valuable to future historians in understanding how the radicalization and subsequent wars in the Middle East happened.
I got to see these in the Prado last year. It was a piety emotionally stunning experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings#/media/File:Fr...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings#/media/File:La...
Apparently, this is considered a very good result for abstract paintings: "Throughout the experiments, the students typically picked the professional pieces between 60% and 70% of the time."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/1...
Regarding those soviet paintings, Goya depicted war and suffering, and is very well known and highly regarded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808 . But your point is the core of what the article is trying to get at. The people who evaluate art are looking for something that isn't being satisfied by the same criteria as i.e. journalism, cuisine, even music to a certain extent.