I swung Jim's (of Jim's Journal) comment on this posting here over to Samizdata, basically because I thought they'd like it and comment on it, and so it has proved. Most agreed, some chiming in with further gleeful stories of pranksters inserting undetectably random bric-a-brac into other places of modern art worship.

A_t dissented, as is his habit on Samzidata, and issued the following challenge:

I'm curious though... from all you people who've just been dissing away, is there anything of the modern world of art or music that you actually like?

My answer is that it depends what exactly you mean by "modern". Taking the word in its literal sense, to mean recent, I generally like the latest architectural stuff with its sun-glasses glass and shiny steel exteriors, and I like lots of current pop music and lots of current movies.

But of course that isn't quite what A_t means, or wants us here to mean, by "modern", or I don't think it is. He means the very self-consciously artistic "modern art" stuff, of the sort that qualifies for Arts Council grants and a spot in a Modern Art museum or Modern Music concert at Symphony Hall. And by this definition, "modern art" has been going since at least as far back as the teens and twenties of the last century,

In other words "modern" means a particular sort of style or attitude to doing art, rather than merely that which is the most recent art. "Modern Art" in this sense is quite capable of being superceded by something very different, and I for one hope that it is.

So. What – if any – of that stuff do I like? My answer to that is: you're right mate, pretty damn little. And I should guess that goes for most of the rest of the Samizdata writership and readership.

Whenever you hear the phrase "I'm curious", you know you are in the company of an enemy whose intentions are far more hostile than he wishes third-party onlookers to realise. A smiling prosecuting council, in other words, trying to box you in with a question which is only apparently inconsequential.

And what A_t is, I think, getting at with his question is that I, and Samizdata, and most of Samizdata's readers, are all mindlessly prejudiced against all Modern Art. And what a pack of fools to object to an entire category of human artefact just because it's recent. He is, I believe, definition hopping. He uses the phrase "modern" to refer to a particular category of human artefact define by its philosophy and attitude rather than its time of creation, and having extracted the required answer, he than wants to announce to those third-party onlookers that we oppose everything that has happened for the last fifty to a hundred years, simply because of when it happened, and that, again mindlessly, we want to turn the clock back to some golden age of our own foolish imagining.

But we do not oppose "Modern Art" mindlessly. We oppose it very mindfully. It's that philosophy, that attitude, that we object to, not the dates. And we're right to object to that attitude, because it's a stupid attitude.

We are our editors now. If you try playing word games with us on our blogs, we'll expose it, and we'll have the last word.

Which was, for now, going to be that. But instead I will add this reply to A_t from "David", which appeared at Samizdata after I'd written the above.

A_t,

Yes, I do like some modern art, mostly aviation or space art. The Air Force Academy has some excellent paintings as well as the tourist area of the Space Center in Orlando.

Other than that, my enjoyment of painting ends with Matisse. No, I'll take that back, I do like some of Kandinsky's paintings. After that people merely looked for a way to make a name for themselves. One guy would paint only black squares. After that, nobody else was allowed to paint black squares, as if he had cornered the art market on that theme. Jackson Pollack owned splatter art. Rothko got to do large vaguely square colors. Franz Kline got black on white and Reinhardt got the best, monocolor (look, it's all black, it's art).

The problem with this approach is that it fails to appeal to the mass market because people realize they could, with no training, produce similar art. Furthermore, the art no longer touches our soul. In fact, artists almost seem to go out of their way to ensure that their products are inaccesible. I think it gives them a sense of self-importance and soothes their feelings of inadaquacy, but that's just an opinion.
As someone who loves painting and has invested considerable time and expense to visit every major art museum in Asia, Europe and the U.S., with the exception of Russia, it hurts to see the wasteland which so called modern art has made of the great artistic traditions.

Painting, regardless of the culture or style, has the potential of moving us and that has been tossed aside in the last fifty years.

Which is why I only really enjoy modern aviation and space art. The people who paint those pictures do so with a love and dedication missing from the "serious" art community. And that love can move me to tears, something de Kooning and Dubuffet never will.

Mindless? I think not.