Should we appreciate art we were manipulated into liking, or pretending to appreciate?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
I love art. Contemporary art is a bunch of ugly wankery by pretentious people who are bored of actual beauty and can only amuse themselves by creating ugly stuff, then claiming "you just don't get it". The world would be a significantly better place without contemporary art in it.
If there is any change I could make to the human personality at large it would be the reflexive opinion that anything you don't understand, or even dislike, is automatically morally wrong.
This might shock you, but most art is made by artists. Artists also tend to spend lots of their time consuming other art. This informs the type of art they create.
Here's an anecdote: Pablo Picasso learned to paint realistic scenes, including humans, the equivalent of Da Vinci or Michelangelo, around the age of 17 or 18.
Where do you go from there? In his case, he went towards cubism and other such "modern art". Why do you suppose that is?
