I know it's popular to hate on modern art, and your post will be the most upvoted (and I upvoted you too, so that my response would be more visible), but I want to offer an alternative view.

Art is about the artist attempting to generate an emotional response in an audience. Books, painting, music, are all there to create joy, sadness, melancholy, laughter, suspense, excitement.

Human emotions are universal, which is the beauty of art.

But humans themselves are not. What one person finds funny, another finds disgusting. What one finds sad, another finds pathetic. Which is why we need so many genres of art.

This is why we need both Classical Music, and Heavy Metal, and Country. Dramas and Comedies.

But what happens when art ceases to generate an emotional response? Does it even have value?

This is what happened to the classical art world at the turn of the impressionism. Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. And besides, photo-realistic representations of scenery was about to be improved and replaced with...photography.

So the artists went back to the drawing board, started challenging the status quo, and came up with Impressionism. Cubism. And a million other *isms that I, an uneducated rube, can't even begin to name or speak about with competency.

But each one isn't meant to be universal, to generate an emotional response in the audience. You can walk through a museum, and see a 100 paintings, and feel nothing. And that's okay! What's worth it is the one painting you see that causes you to feel something. Then it worked.

"Modern art" (which itself can be exploded into a million different categories falls into a bit of that. And it simply cannot be appreciated with a simple low-resolution gif on a monitor.

For one, it sits on the context of what came before. It responds to art that preceded it. You can get mad about that and think it should stand on it's own, but consider how much of mass media depends on an implicit understanding of the culture and what preceded it.

For another, it's frequently a 3 dimensional medium. Seeing the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting must be seen in person to truly marvel at the incredible ability to make something appear out of nothing ("This brush stroke is a dog. It's clearly a dog. but when you look up close, it's just a single simple brush stroke.")

Finally, and this brings me full circle to your point, sometimes you need to actively place yourself into a position to feel something.

Consider the difference between listening to a new song on earbuds on a loud subway train, vs on high quality headphones on your beanbag chair at home alone, vs with an audience in a magnificent concert hall. Your emotional response is going to be entirely different.

So when you see something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change.", you could default to "Wow, whoever painted this must be a giant gasbag".

You could scoff and say "My 4 year old niece could have painted that, and I wouldn't put it on my fridge"

You could say "What does this millennial know about the role of art as a medium for change."

Or you could stop, clear your head, and actually think about the words. How do you feel about society? How does the art before you make you feel? How does it feel to stand on the shoulders of giants?"

Maybe you'll feel nothing and move along, and that's okay.

But maybe you'll actually get some insights or an emotional repsonse from the piece, which is what the author hoped you would.