An expert opinion on Modern Art…

Some ten years ago, I once saw a cartoon, called Top Cat, I think… where this particularly enterprising cat decides to make a lot of dough by selling modern art. Not much of an artist himself, he nevertheless manages to create a few masterpieces by tying a paintbrush to the tails of a few tortoises and letting them roam around on the canvas.

Now, for a very long time, (remember that I was young then…) I thought that this was how these paintings were painted. The better the paintings were, (the closer they resembled what they were supposed to resemble!) the better trained were the tortoises used, or so I thought…

It seems that I was incorrect. It turned out that people painted those… things… themselves. I’ve often wondered why modern art became popular all of a sudden. Perhaps art connoisseurs grew tired of paintings which appeared extremely realistic, and began encouraging deviations from reality. Slight distortions at first, I suppose, and slowly things began to get out of hand. Picasso and the Cubists were born… Eventually, artists became so bad… that they were considered to be good! And thus, modern art was born…

Well… it’s an interesting theory in any case, and I was leaning towards it when something else struck me… something that seemed more plausible…

There was this exhibition I went to in Bangalore the other day, where I was leafing through the catalogue, when I came across Exhibit 31: Lady in a Bathtub. Being the red-blooded teenager that I am, I hurried forth to inspect the work of art. However, modern art reared it’s ugly head…

I saw streaks of red and green, and hints of yellow in between… but there wasn’t a trace of a lady anywhere in that bizarre mix of colours. Neither was a bathtub for that matter… Deeply disappointed, I turned away. Nearby, there was this old geezer spouting his theories on art, so I joined the audience…

Modern Art, he informed us, was not a true representation of the object being portrayed. You bet it isn’t, I thought gloomily, my thoughts still on the unaccounted-for lady. One had to see underneath, he explained, to find what inspired the artist to draw… I was pretty sure of what inspired the artist, the tiny sticker at the top of the painting, proclaiming that (in the artist’s view at least) the painting was worth ten thousand rupees…

The tiny audience nodded along, though I did catch a look of bewilderment on a few of the faces… But evidently, this guy was an expert, and one just didn’t disagree with them.

Which brings us to this very interesting thought. What if the whole thing was a scam? What if some people started the whole thing as a joke, and gradually pulled the whole of the public in? Some big-shot proclaims Modern Art as a new genre of painting, and the whole herd follows. No one wants to look stupid, disagreeing with everyone else… And the thing ends up like the Emperor’s new clothes… on a much larger scale!

That’s it for now, I got a painting to finish and millions to make :)