Abstract painting explained – Part 12

To create his abstract masterpieces, Jackson Pollack put a large canvas on the floor and splashed buckets of wet paint on it. Andy Warhol traced photos of soup cans and celebrities, then reduced the images to flat patterns, slightly separated (out of register) the images in different colors and printed many copies of each of them by silk screen process. Roy Lichtenstein projected images of comic strip characters on a large, wall-mounted canvas. He then traced them exactly, including the type “balloons” of the characters speaking, and filled in the colored areas with dot patterns.

Their resulting abstract “paintings” now hang in major museums, and also sell for multimillions to private collectors. The so-called skill or supposed talent of producing such masterpieces is in no way comparable to the traditional, realistic paintings of Rembrandt, Rafael, Da Vinci, Ingres, David or Vermeer. The artists who create abstract paintings, while often clever marketers, substitute skill and beauty with outrageousness, anger, political agendas and just plain flim-flam.

Why is abstract art so popular and lucrative if the artist is lucky enough and lives long enough to cash in on them? And why does some of its worst examples command enormous sums of money? I believe the entire business is trumped up by the mentality of the puffed-up marketing hype we see today in sports and entertainment. The same too-wealthy people who are willing to spend several thousand bucks for two hours to be seen sitting in a ringside seat, don’t question the multi-million-dollar price on a distorted piece of show-off art peddled by a rip-off marketer.

The same questions may be asked of rap stars who make millions by chanting ungrammatical curses to an annoying drum beat that have no relationship to music. Why does a movie star with very limited talent except to look sexy with Botox and bosom enhancement command millions of dollars to feign acting for several hours a day over a six-week schedule? Why do seven-foot athletes get millions for standing on tippy-toes and shoving a ball into a basket? And why does a steriod-inflated baseball player sign a ten-year contract at ten million a year because his enhanced muscles and bat can hit a ball 400 feet? By comparison to those examples of abstract skills, the artistic rip-off talent exhibited by oil company executives to earn them their millions seems almost fair.

I know I sound like an angry old man, which is perfectly true, but many