If you have lots of free time, read this about abstract art and give your own thoughts.
I've been talking to myself (on the forums) this morning about art games where you paint pictures and sell them (like Passpartout), and it reminded me of listening to a debate between my father, who's an actual genius, and an unknown patron at the National Art Gallery in Washington DC.
All three of us were standing together looking at a modernist abstract painting of a blue square on a white background when the other person said, "It's wonderful, isn't it?" to which my father replied something along the lines of "No, it's a blue square that we've all agreed to pretend is wonderful because we're afraid that saying the truth makes us look uncultured and unintelligent."
This was followed by a debate where my father explained the misuse of the word "abstract" and conveyed the traditional definition of art as an abstraction of some part of the human experience and said that the person who made the square was, instead of an artist, simply a painter who, if he showed any real aptitude, should get a job painting houses in a nearby subdivision. I don't remember much of what the other person said. I remember him saying something about the particular shade of blue used to make the square, but that's it.
To be honest, I kind of wanted to side with the other guy, otherwise the implications of us having filled a good part of the National Art Gallery with this stuff were a little too much for me.
My uneducated opinion now as an old guy is that these artists were actually rebelling against the human condition by rebelling against art. and the statement they were trying to make could be childishly summarized as "this whole thing sucks" even though they may not have understood this is what they were saying at the time. The uglier and more banal they were able to make their work, the stronger was their complaint about the human condition. After all, the 20th century was filled with strife and philosophical and religious disillusionment. Framed this way, it's possible that blue square really was wonderful.
But this is just a retrospective interpretation by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.