Art is not complicated at all. Art marketers and pseudo-artists like to make it complicated to keep the "contemporary art" scam alive and profitable.
That's because real art, like anything (engineering, piano, sports) takes years and years of hard work to perfect the skill which gives the ability to translate your ideas into something beautiful and self-explanatory (when you don't need to be expert to "understand the meaning" as it is with masters like Michelangelo).
A great example is when Henry Moore saw Michelangelo and started to cry and confessed the only reason he makes such statues is because he knows "he will never be able to create anything as beautiful as that"
Perhaps he would if instead he worked on things that are hard.
It's hilarious how modern art lives on creating documentaries, popularizing an "artist" then selling art for investment while fooling people by using shaming tactics like "you just don't understand art" or "that was not the point artist was trying to make"
If the artist has to explain her work in words he should have chosen literature as a form of expression for clearly she failed using her current means to do so.
There's a lot of bullshit around art in general; it's not limited to modern art. If we only cared about the quality of the work, then a perfect forgery of da Vinci's style would be valued exactly as much as an original da Vinci.
I can't agree with the idea that art has to be technically difficult to be "real." If a simple, abstract sculpture gives me more joy than a portrait from a great master, that doesn't mean my understanding is defective. (Nor is yours if you disagree.) Meaning isn't limited to what the creator says it is, either.
People are obsessed with nailing down a precision definition of "art," and it always turns out to be "the stuff I like, but not that crap you like."
I take your point on joy, and art perhaps has a broader spectre, like music. I can enjoy nice simple pop song but I don't confuse with Chopin.
On technical level. I disagree. There's a difference.
A piano player that plays a flawless Beethoven, is not Beethoven because there's a difference between the ability to compose and ability to play a composed piece.
And so it is with your analogy of Da Vinci vs. forgery.
> A great example is when Henry Moore saw Michelangelo and started to cry and confessed the only reason he makes such statues is because he knows "he will never be able to create anything as beautiful as that"
In the film „Carving a reputation” (BBC, 1998) , it is said that when he saw the Medici Tombs (1524-31, in the Medici Chapel in Florence) during his travel scholarship when he was a student of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, – he didn’t want to look at Michelangelo’s work at first, but finally he admitted that those figures posess “a tremendous monumentality. (…) a grandeur of gesture and scale that for me is what great sculpture is” – wrote Moore in his diary . The nobility and grandeur of the Italian tradition was a humbling experience that threw Moore into a profound depression. To be a great sculptor, this is what he had to compete with.
He later claimed the reason he's "inspired" by "sumerian" art is that "he feels greco-roman art is over-represented.
