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Conceptualism is likely something that will still annoy those that don’t care for “modern” art but you aren’t likely to participate in it. If you aren’t participating in the conversation then your voice can be safely ignored as irrelevant. If you want to join the conversation learn some theory and some history because it’s mostly a philosophy and critical theory now. It’s not so much elitist as it is difficult for new comers.

It is not that the general public hasn't the skill or taste to "understand" contemporary art, or that their reaction to it is irrelevant. It is that contemporary art has made itself irrelevant to the vast majority, through just such claptrap as "deconstruction" and "critical theory". Much the same can be said for poetry and literature.

But, people have been told by the elitist types for years that their seeing crap art as crap is due to their unsophisticated and ignorant tastes. It isn't.

I contend that art invokes emotional response. If the vast majority of viewers have the emotional response of indifference, or that what they are viewing is total crap, then guess what? The art is total crap.

Jackson Pollock's works are total crap, and the only reason for his fame and the price of his drop cloth drippings, is because an elite group of jaded society "art critics" decided to make him their darling.

Art is that which moves, inspires emotion, relates to the human condition, connects us through common experience. By that measure, the lauded artist of last century are greatly failures. Their works relate poorly, are devoid of content, devoid of common experience, are unaccessible to the vast majority of humanity. One shouldn't need a degree in Fine Art to "understand" art, because art needs no self-appointed explanatory intercessors.

You don't need a degree in art to understand intrinsically the cave paintings at Lascaux, or the statues of Greece and Rome, the patterned tiles of Alhambra and intricate knots of Celtic bibles. You don't need it to understand the play of light captured by Monet or the power of the sea captured by Homer. They all speak to the common experience of human kind, and need no translator or deconstruction. The artistry is manifest.

Want to know who the greatest artist of the 20th century was? Walt Disney.

He touched more people with his art than Rothko, Pollock or Serrano could ever hope to, even if they weren't doomed to be forgotten historical footnotes of a tasteless era when fine art tried its damnedest to become entirely irrelevant.