Who Needs (Post-)Modern Art?

At the risk of sounding an old-fashioned bore, I have to say that in my eyes nearly any piece of graphic arts (sculpture, painting, etc.) created after WWII represents an unsavoury mix of ego-bloating, blatant marketing and an exhausted artistic paradigm.

My idea about art is that it should contain either Beauty or Meaning. When there are both, we are dealing with Great Art. When there's neither - most likely it is a modern piece.

When photography became technologically established and wide-spread enough to serve to represent reality, graphic arts went through the Crisis of Representation. You did not need a painter to represent reality on a canvas any more - so art went down the slippery road of filling the missing parts of the aesthetic paradigm. Everything has been tried just for the sake of trying - including exhibiting air-tight containers with faeces in major museums like the MoMA, the Tate Gallery and the Centre Pompidou.

It proved abortive, if addictive: now you don't have to bother coming up with anything beautiful or meaningful as long as you give your pieces convoluted or mysteriously sounding names, best with no relation whatsoever to the subject. With the general rise of living standards, practically anyone, gifted or not, can go to an art school and now that modern art market is well established and is worth billions, worldwide art has become a market commodity. The only way to judge an artist is their market success which can always be expressed monetarily, and as we all know from the examples of Coca Cola and Microsoft's Windows anything we marketed can become a worldwide hit. Like the old saying goes, 'Millions and millions of flies like shit.' But modern art is the kind of shit that can give you an aura of lofty sophistication and trendiness. Propelled by the eternal human attributes of greed and vanity, modern art market is an indestructible profit-generating monster.