if I saw a Rothko or a Pollock at a flea market without knowing who they were, I would walk right past it. Absolute garbage.
In high school I did my art appreciation paper on Ad Reinhart, knowing it would be easy. I got an A.
A lot of that crap, including Pollack was paid for by the CIA with the deliberate goal of demoralization of the USSR somehow. I think it’s pretty obvious they were aiming at the west too.
https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
Pollocks paintings were literal experiments with how new and different paint materials behaved under different circumstances.
For example he wanted to see what happened when latex (then newish) behaved while applied or dried flat on the ground or when applied with a stick or a flick or on top of different paints (say, an oil on top of latex).
It was a serious investigation akin to blood splatter experts look at how blood splatters from a knife or a gun or a hit.
He was literally trying different things to get different effects, not actually painting as painting.
No one was more surprised than Pollock when people liked his studies of paint qualities as art than him.
There’s a YouTube by him on it.
It ironically made me understand his works better. Like one he was trying to express anger or action by violent hits. And it does, just like blood splatter.
But they were meant to teach techniques, not be “art”.