I'm not starting off on the wrong foot. I started off fully aware that the point of Pollack's action painting wasn't technical ability. I only mentioned it because there are lots of people in this thread who actually seem to think his paintings displayed a genius level of technical ability that mere mortals could not possibly attain through any level of hard work.

The issue I have is that within the high art community and art historians and art critics there is no limit to the amount of shit they will swallow from con-men. They eagerly await the next completely ridiculous story. I'm certain there were lots of modern/abstract/etc artists that were legitimate, and as you said, struggled and worked hard their entire lives to produce work.

One of the biggest problems I have with finding meaning in such work is that given the fact that the resulting product of such artists can either be a flag draped on a toilet, a black dot drawn in the center of a piece of paper, random plaint splashes repeated in a semi methodical way in order to create a coherent composition, or even shit in a can, I am not convinced that we have managed to accurately separate charlatans and con men from people that actually put effort into what they did. And if you have an industry where mediocre or even laughably bad end products are similar in apparent quality to celebrated masterpieces and there are millions of dollars at stake you can be certain that the con men have shown up in droves.

You can derive great meaning from Pollack and others that it didn't inherently possess. It can have a real impact on you, your life, and how you see the world. That doesn't mean there's an inherent wealth of knowledge to be found that I'm missing out of ignorance. It just means that the art work speaks to you in some way.

Picasso was actually a highly skilled classically trained artist and that experience was an important part of what he became. I only like a few of his paintings, but in some of them while it looks strange to a person accustomed to traditional art, the competence and technical mastery is clearly apparent to someone that knows what they are looking at. Nude Descending a Staircase is a legitimate masterpiece, for example.

And also, to be clear, I'm not saying that any of the examples I listed are not "real" art. They are all real art, I just find master level works of classical realism, expressionism, and many other genres more interesting, due to the undeniable difference in technical mastery and work ethic required to produce them. And by work ethic I don't just mean the number of hours a person spends doing a thing. If I spend 10 years playing basketball 16 hours a day with my kid in my driveway I wouldn't get to magically claim that what I'm doing makes me just as good at basketball as NBA players and demand that the world ignores the fact that my results aren't even close to what theirs are.

I get it that they weren't interested in being considered "good" artists. That's fine, they can do whatever they want and the world has enough room for everyone. I am just not interested in people that don't care about being good at what they do for a living. I'm not interested in social statements or political statements that aren't accompanied by substance. Other people might be and that's great.

When it comes to all forms of art, media, music, film, etc, the things I find most interesting are when people or groups of people are operating at such a high level of skill that almost nobody in history can compare to the work they produce.