 I'm a graduating student in Museology, so, I've had some 200 hours of study of art. Let me attempt to explain something about this much misunderstood subject. I'll focus on paintings.
One of the major mistakes some people do about modern art, in my opinion, is to believe that there is an enigma to be deciphered, a riddle in the painting, something to be found that will make that whole work make sense and reveal it's "secret".
Most of the time in modern art...specially in the abstract paintings that seem to concern you the most, Xtothez, there isn't such a thing.
Modern art comes from a process, wich started in the nineteenth century, right after the invention of photography. A few of the most imaginative painters of that time, started to wonder if they should continue to try to reproduct reality when there was already an instrument that could do it, in a much more simple way.
Men like Edouard Manet, Joseph M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, and others, broke gradually the rules of academic (rennaissance like) painting, either by a daring use of colors, by the absence of the rennaissance's perspective (wich gave the ilusion that the painting was a "cube" and not a "board"), or the by a non academic use of brush strokes (not trying to make the painting look real), and such.
What they were trying to do was show people that the painting was a painting, a bidimensional work of brush and paint, over a canvas, not an illusion of reality. The photography was already good enough for that.
Gradually they broke the laws of academic art, showing things as representations, not reproduction. Their next step was to break away from reality, showing what photography could not capture, what nature could not make. That was abstract art. Random shapes, wich existed only on the painters mind, or geometric shapes, that existed only by invention of mankind, started to be represented.
I could write much about the differences between each kind of modern art, and I'll do so if you'd like, but the same point in all of them, is that painting became a mental exercise, not a show of manual hability. Marcel Duchamp, one of the greatest modern artist, used to say a phrase he attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci: "Painting is a mental work." Anyone can draw that. The difference is what was the intention when drawing it. What is related to the Manifests of the movement wich the author was a member.
Now...why does it sell for so much? Many were the objectives of the diferent artistic movements, but none of them had the objective of making the artists rich. But when modern art became "cult", several times, after the authors of the paintings had died, people started to want to have them. People with money. And that is a law of capitalist society. If many people want it, it costs more. Specially when there is a limited offer of original paintings.
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