Here are some links to "Modern Art" is the museums have paid thousands and in some cases millions of dollars for. Apparently they feel that these works are comparable or even superior to the Classics.
Cold Mountain and (Bridge)
In the late 1980s Brice Marden began a series of large-scale paintings that featured sinuous webs of interconnected lines. This series, titled Cold Mountain, was a radical departure from the smaller canvases layered with waxy color that had defined the artist's work for more than two decades.
A book of Chinese poetry inspired the Cold Mountain paintings. Marden laid out the six paintings according to the graphic layout used in the poems. He then began to selectively rub out and repaint lines in order to enmesh the lines and have them recede into space. Although this painting looks very different from Marden's early work, his use of line calls attention to the importance of layering present in all phases of his work. Submerging and emerging lines record the interplay of layers that defines his painterly style.
No. 14, 1960
You might find the writing opinion rather interesting...
Mark Rothko's passion as an artist was to explore the intellectual and abstract potentials of painting. No. 14, 1960 is a mature, masterful work that poetically achieves Rothko's intention to create a spiritual art. As eloquently stated by John Graham in 1937, "The purpose of art in particular is to re-establish a lost contact with the un-conscious . . . and to keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind." Rothko's early experiments with abstraction, whether influenced by automatism, archaic art, symbolism, or anthropomorphism, ultimately sought to capture this spiritual dimension. By the 1950s and 1960s, pure color and a sense of light became Rothko's vocabulary to express his inner perceptions and to engage the viewer's unconscious responses.
Rothko's genius in the use of color as form, and his ability to hold on a single plane colors that advance and retreat, are amply demonstrated in this work. Rothko soaked paint into the canvas, resulting in a subtle diffusion that is similar to the feathery effect of watercolor. The orange form in No. 14,1960 is a velvety mixture of light and heavy strokes of paint, and this layering effect creates the luminous quality of the color. The rich warm brown in the background is a more solid paint application that envelops or cradles the more airy orange form. The blue form is a vibrant contrast to the orange, creating a sense of energy or tension where the two colors engage each other across the horizontal band of brown.
Zim Zum l
In the decade after World War II, Barnett Newman (1905-1970) emerged as one of the leading abstract expressionist artists. Known primarily as a painter, Newman was also deeply interested in sculpture and architecture. Zim Zum Iis a large-scale, fully experiential sculpture that has its parallel in the abstract expressionist artist's large-scale. Like those wall-sized works, Zim Zum Iinvites direct participation, or even communion. Purchased directly from the estate of the artist, Zim Zum Iis the last great sculpture completed by Newman during his lifetime. The piece has been on extended loan to the Tate Gallery in London.
Composed of two walls, each of which is constructed of six Cor-ten steel plates, Zim Zum Itakes the form of a corridor that the viewer can walk both through and around. Each of the walls zig-zags at right angles, creating (if seen from above) a series of equal-sized sqare spaces through which the viewer passes. Newman had been exploring the notion zig-zagged walls since the early 1950s, when he conceived of an architectural setting for showing paintings in which each work would hang on a solid wall that was lit by a second wall of solid glass set at ninety degrees from the first. In 1963, Newman incorporated zig-zag walls into an architectural model for a synagogue.
Zim Zum Iwas originally made for an international group exhibition at the Hakone Museum in Japan. Its scale was influenced by the maximum size of what could be accommodated as ship cargo from New York to Japan. Newman's original design for the piece called for a scale approximately fifty percent larger than that of Zim Zum I. The larger version of the piece, which became known as Zim Zum II,was completed posthumously in 1985 to the artist's original specifications.
Zim Zum Ijoins two other works by Newman in the SFMOMA permanent collection. Untitled(Number 3) from 1949 -- a small, early oil painting bearing horizontal stripes--was given to the Museum by the artist's widow, Annalee Newman in 1996. The collection also contains the acrylic painting Untitled,from 1970, a fractional gift of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis that was the last canvas Newman completed before his death the same year.