Another of my favorite examples of the "reproduction doesn't do any justice" is Mark Rothko. Like Pollock, he's often held up as example of an artist whose work "doesn't look like anything" and "my kid could do that." And it's true, if you're looking at a poster of a Rothko, it just looks like some large splotches of color.

But, in a gallery, people encounter the Rothko and just stop. Many of them will stare at those large splotches of color for 1, 2, 5, even 10 minutes. Turns out there's a whole lot going on there that just doesn't translate into print.

Sadly, a lot of the techniques that abstract expressionists used don't translate well into the future, either. Layering just oil paint, that's pretty durable. Layering different kinds of paint, not so much. I've seen a fly dislodge a flake of paint from one of Rothko's paintings just by landing on it.