@twouptom - 'Art' is a ready field for the conman, trickster etc. just like the stock market is. no-one forces you to look at art, or go into a gallery - if they sell bad art, they go broke - simple!
We were talking established and revered artists! What you would describe as scribbles and writhing wormlike things having sex - and I think I know which one you are talking about - also has merit as a symphony in space with colour, and without necessarily telling a story - Olsen's paintings are like that,too - and I recently watched a film about him - where he literally 'took a line for a walk' even did some hand-painting like children do - hand against canvas and pressure and colour smeared in a specific area - but the finished painting was simply beautiful to look at.
I don't particularly like him as a man - artists are often very self-centered, narcissistic people, but the ones who make it to the top are usually good. My one particular dislike is Andy Warhol - I cannot for the life of me get the message of his multiplicity of Campbells soup cans' or one portrait only (Marylin Monroe) mutli-coloured and repeated 10 times (?) hanging in a row on a wall in a big-name museum in the U.S.A., and would not want this in a living room - maybe in a panopticum gallery, where weird and and simply curious things from the 20th century are exhibited. Taurisk
