May I give you here my very personal and unsolicited opinion about modern arts: exception for movies and literature, I see it as mostly cheap, fast stuff made by con men/women who should thank God not to be obliged to work in an assembly line.
Painting has deteriorated to a kind of decoration but more ugly. In former times, a painter learned his job for years and years and the great ones never stopped learning and developing. Nowadays, a painter is someone who holds a brush in his hands, has some expensive color on the table nearby and busies himself to transfer the stuff on a flat surface.
A painter nowadays is nearly exclusively a person who has scant knowledge of painting techniques and is unable to make a living from it.
Sure, there are some real painters among us. Unfortunately, these people need one or two months at best to finish their job and nobody wants to pay thousands of Dollars or Euros to an unknown artist. If they don't want to die of hunger they have to do something else to make a living.
Last not least, the art of painting has no rules, these days. Nobody knows what is a good painting and what is a bad one.
Thus, painting as an art is dead, stone dead. Later centuries will probably look aghast at our artistic performances.
For those who are not yet tired of reading, what about this story that took place in some years ago in Beaubourg, the Paris museum of modern arts. Upon arrival in the morning (probably around 10 a.m., this is not a factory), the guards discovered to their stupefaction that one of those works of art had changed substantially over night.
If I am not totally wrong this happened to a work from the German artist Joseph Buys. It shows a fully equipped room featuring an unmade bed and various other items, mostly disposed in artistic disorder.
Unfortunately for this world famous artist, the charwoman (also called surface technician over here) newly hired by the museum took herself to the job to clean the room thoroughly.
Well, I imagine the restoration squad of the museum could face the challenge.......
PS to all that: just added a third picture following Anrosh's comment. This drawing from Käte Kollwitz is neither beautiful nor a homage to nature. But it gives emotion, plenty of it. Ms. Kollwitz lost her child in the last war and this drawing shows a mother taken away by the death far too early for her young child.
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