Here is something I don’t feel heart-sinkingly empty about: Art. Gatekeeping a genre out from the entire whole. My history of western art class teacher called Jackson Pollock’s work “dribbling into the air bs.”
It’s a pretty mainstream tendancy. There’s already a rebuttal to similar views from the nineteenth century:
“It should be remembered that a picture - before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order,” - Morris Dennis
At the same time it seems it would be easy to criticize White on White that sold for $15M at a 2014 auction.
I can understand that even more ridiculous things have happened in the name of abstract art, like this one: