Thread: how come modern art sucks?

Wait...shouldn't art get better and better? But I can't help but notice that modern art is far less supior than art in the Renassaince. I mean modern art is just a mess of colors and crap that looks nothing realistic.I'm not much into art, but I think modern art sucks.

It depends on what you mean by "better". Modern art perhaps doesn't display the technical proficiency of the Renaissance art, but they do what art is supposed to do--evoke emotional responses, depict the social/human condition, represent the artist's personal beliefs/values/ideals, etc. Art doesn't get better or worse; it just takes on different forms, which people then judge according to their subjective preferences.

Also, it's difficult to pin what constitutes "modern art". You have a range of styles and movements from the late 19th century to the early 1970s that fit within the modern art era, which range from Impressionism (my personal favorite artistic movement) to color field paintings and Pollock-ian action paintings. If technically proficient paintings are your cup of tea, there's the Photorealism school of painters (eg. Richard Estes, Chuck Close).