Expect an answer sometime in 2025.
I’ll be waiting. 
Awww. Did we just get an “F” in Middle School Art? Did the teacher not like your glitter unicorn made out of macaroni?
Rejecting the works of Picasso is more than a little plebeian 1920’s style. Accomplished art haters go after harder targets like ReNOir, the fake impressionist with real protests instead of just vapid internet comments.
["The museum isn’t mounting a big Renoir show, or celebrating the artist in some other way. Any institution foolhardy enough to do so knows by now to expect some kind of pushback, because everyone hates Renoir, and everyone always has. Maybe even, yes, God.
So there wasn’t, in fact, a new or timely reason for the protesters to gather where and when they did—they just really hate Renoir. Max Geller, the leader of a group called Renoir Sucks at Painting, organized the strike earlier this week. And it’s fair to say Geller has strong feelings about the artist."](Why Everyone (Possibly Including God) Hates Renoir - The Atlantic)
I personally believe that deriding Picasso, ReNOir or Jackson Pollock is like bullying the retarded kid in elementary school. It may feel good but it won’t earn you any real street cred. However, I am with you on the burning and absolute destruction technique though although my preferred target would be different. My dream in life is to make enough money to buy every existing Frank Lloyd Wright designed building and then destroy them one at a time on a TV series devoted to the cathartic purging.
Yeah I read this far - post#9 - until I realized this was a reanimated art thread. (And not a thread re animated art.)
Still that post’s claim rubbed me the wrong way enough that I want to respond even this many years later (even if it is a bit of a belated me-too at this point). No, art appreciation does not require that one does reading. There is a certain sort of art appreciation that is an intellectual exercise with the equivalent of in-jokes, and certain streams of modern art are heavily weighted to that sort of appreciation, but art is also appreciated on individualized emotional and psychological levels with the aggregate experience not owned or controlled by the artist: the experience of art is completed by the viewer, may be different each view, and is valid even if it is completely other than what the artist intended.
IMHO the best works of art work on multiple levels at the same time and a work that only works on one is hard to call great: something pretty but without emotion and that does not engage the intellect risks being decoration more than art; something that is an intellectual exercise alone and that fails to engage the viewer’s other senses and emotions also lacks as art. (How many besides Lichtenstein thought is was so clever to reference brushstrokes with techniques that showed no brushstrokes?) Art that is self-awaringly and self-referentially about art and its techniques (more than using art to be about the emotional, psychological, and non-art world related intellectual responses it evokes) is by its nature elitist and invariably leaves many cold. Art that requires reading to be appreciated IMHO fails; art that one appreciates at much deeper and varied levels with reading succeeds.
So, I realized this was a zombie but kept reading, anyway. Here’s a working link to André Derain’s “Turning Road” at the MFAH. Still a favorite.
The best way to appreciate art is to look at it. Repeatedly. Of course, much fine art is only available if you travel. Thus, books, the 'net, films, etc. Which even help you learn more about stuff you’ve seen. Not just Paris In the Twenties–how about The Middle Ages & the Renaissance? Not to mention non-Western art, which can be a tough nut to crack. By the way, the MFAH had a Cubist show a few years back that featured supplementary material like photos of Picasso’s studio–decorated with his own photos of African art. He stole widely!
Back in 1998, Houston’s 3 big art museums shared a Robert Rauschenberg show that originated at the Guggenheim. (Hey, he came from Beaumont.) It was truly enlightening to watch his development over many years. All black canvases? All white canvases? Stages he was going through.
Not that you have to “like” all art. I fully acknowledge Rothko’s power. But the darkness gets to me & I tend to avoid the Rothko Chapel.
You like those kids with the huge eyes, I’ll bet.
Gosh, I was so energetic and feisty so many years ago. Where are we now? (also relieved to find that I’d already ranted in this thread. I’m still finished with it)
I just loved the trash language, while also taking the time to pick the fancy-font letters for Brancusi. Hurling poop with a silver ladle.
Didn’t Cubism provoke all sorts of rage at the time? So it’s not like his is a new view.
As for Brancusi, all I can think of is his “Portrait of Eileen Lane”, here:
and hope Eileen got her money back, because that doesn’t look like her at all.
“No, I get my height from my father, but all of mother’s family have amorphous silver blobs for faces. She was Dutch, you see…”
I know a chap who hates Picasso with brutal fury. He calls Picasso’s work “ground glass scratched in Europe’s eyes.”
Now, this guy also just happens to be a Nazi…
Why can’t these guys just look the other direction? If you don’t like Picasso, don’t look at Picasso. Why are they so dead-set on burning things so that no one can look at them?
Yep. I’m not a fan of much of what is considered modern art, but ever since I saw Nude Descending a Staircase, I was a convert. Not Picasso (Duchamp), and knowing that was the key to getting the Final Jeopardy question a few days ago.