I love art. My wife and I "consume" a lot of art museums. We always go to at least one wherever we travel. We love the provocation of thought that seeing really good art achieves. I've gotten fairly good at interpreting art. On occasion I've even been called an artist, though I personally don't consider myself one, for a variety of reasons, but mostly due to motivation.

All that is to say, I'm not your typical suburban luddite who signs off on abstractionism as just "squiggly lines anyone could do".

But lately I have to stop and consider that maybe fine art is less relevant today because fine artists are less relevant. I mean, it's not exactly like the latest artists have anything particularly new or surprising for artists to say. For example, "End War" is a popular topic. Way to go out on a limb there, buddy.

Our post-post-modern era of art is just boring.

And it's not just boring. It's increasingly rather shoddy work, too. Where some artists have attempted to cross disciplines and bring new ideas into the academic art sphere, it's significantly devoid of any meaning, derivative, and poor imitations of the forms they are copying. You can apparently get really far in art school if you can find some corner of culture that your Baby Boomer art professors haven't seen and pass off your tutorial sessions as "new".

For example: while visiting my sister in Des Moines, Iowa, we visited the local Des Moines Art Center. All told, an absolutely fine museum of modern art. There was a wide selection of different pieces from both artists I recognized and ones I didn't yet know. But there was one piece that really stuck in my craw.

"Icon" by Rashaad Newsome (http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/exhibitions/singlechannel5...) is a wanton appropriation of 90s-era demoscene visuals with poorly choreographed dance sequences unconvincingly greenscreened on top. Content-wise, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect an art-school sophomore to make.

Now, to some extent, better visuals in 3D graphics aren't exactly at the disposal of anyone who isn't specifically making a career out of 3D graphics. I'd not be able to make much better, and I studied computer graphics as a concentration in my computer science degree 10 years ago.

But that's rather much the point. Modern art museums are not supposed to be the refrigerator door of art school iconoclasts looking for a pat on the back. The cubists weren't bad painters. They were specifically playing with representation and form. You can see it in the confidence of their lines, in their cohesion of their color choices. They had spent years studying painting to gain the fine motor control and insight to forge a new path.

Not flat-textured quads that you could learn how to make in your first hour of playing with THREE.js.

You have to do something with what you're making. You have to use every detail of your piece. There has to be intention. It's not so much that the visuals were poor. It's that they weren't the point of the piece. There was no part of the piece that relied on the fact that the visuals were poor. They were a distraction from whatever else was trying to be made.

This is just the freshest example I have in mind. Hell, I even was hired to build a piece for an artist once[0]. I hated the piece I made. I thought I did a poor job, all my seams were showing and joints weren't aligned properly. I did the best I could in the time and budget, and the artist was more than satisfied. She received high praise for her show. But to me, it was a bad piece, because I didn't do what I thought was a particularly good job in making it.

[0] No, I don't understand how it makes sense for an artist to pass off another person's work in their own show, but apparently it's a real thing and she paid me for it anyway. This is why I don't consider myself an artist. I don't understand how the "aht" world works. There is an unspoken code for how things work. And apparently, the feeling is mutual, hence why I finished college with a computer science degree, rather than the fine art degree I had been accepted for.