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I think the problem with art today is that it's not about art. Art is still seen as decorative, as something "extra," not one of the cornerstones of our culture in a time post-WW2. (I don't say this lightly, but after two decades of research.) After that horror, there was questioning of priorities all over the world.

When soldiers came home, when the Baby Boom happened, and then Vietnam, there was a massive cultural shift. Now paperback books were junk, while the REAL writers were supposed to write New Journalism; movies weren't to entertain, they were to slap you around and shatter your perceptions about the world.

Don't get me wrong--I love plenty of the products of the late-20th century era of "relevence"...but that's just the problem with art--since the mid-century in New York (check out Tom Wolfe's writing about this), art was looked at in this new era as something that was either one of the building blocks for cultural change or junk.

Someone working in the illustrative traditions of American magazines and pop art--Maxfield Parish or Rockwell--was not going to be capable of bring art out of the decorative tradition and bring it into this new age of "meaningful" art. That "old fashioned" art was actually just unpretentious art--the artists knew they weren't changing the world with their paintings. But they were part of the old that had to be cast aside, in favor of art that would be a blow against oppression and all the other stuff the artists' boho friends were into.

The first of these moldy "old" traditions to go had to be representation, which to these young turks had been corrupted by its common availability in entertainment magazines. Worse, it was available to MOM AND DAD!!! , the eternal enemies of the young turks. And since good and bad and all that "moral" crap was really silly, when these artists knew the world was gray, they certainly couldn't be painting purely illustrative visions of the real world as it was.

So if you knock off the most basic illustrative idea--this painted thing represents this real life object--what are you left with?

Nothing. Literally--when you discard the use of illustration, then the artist is free to create his or her own language...

...which of course means that since you've dropped the visual language EVERYONE knows, and you invent your own language, then NO ONE, naturally, knows what you're saying.

The true mark of success? No one (the public) "gets" your stuff. (I often think of Woody Allen, who decided Hannah and Her Sisters was a failure...because it made more money than his movies usually did.) The young artist gets bad reviews from The Man, his parents don't understand him--YES! SUCCESS! He high-fives his fellow artists, who also make this expressionist stuff that has to be translated, not appreciated.

And the only people used to reading this stuff and getting this are those others who do the same thing. The art as an aesthetic object is gone, replaced by what politics the artist has and then expresses in this art, which only those who think like he does enjoy seeing (because they already agree with what he's saying).

Have you ever noticed that whenever a book, or record, or movie is touted as "controversial" or "challenging" in the MSM it is NEVER something with a conservative point of view?

This stuff is never challenging to liberals...because all of this stuff is merely supporting the liberal orthodoxy. It's ironic how the libs are so quick to call others on propaganda, when all of their art merely supports their point of view.

And that's all modern art is now. The artists turn their back on the mainstream they loathe (because they never grew out of their useful rebellion, which is a phase one needs to pass through before making one's own decisions about what's right and wrong) and merely talk to other people who think just like them.

As opposed to just making something beautiful. Which is a lot harder than making something ugly that is valued because it supports someone's ideology.