Is modern art pointless?

Modern art is many things. It can be striking, ambiguous, banal, challenging, self-indulgent, thought-provoking, poignant, and indeed as many other labels as the human imagination is able to conjure. One thing it is not is pointless.

Art often works at one of two levels (although there are many more.) At its simplest it presents the world as it actually is. The purest form of this expression would be photography. Some artists choose to reproduce a landscape or a portrait exactly as it appears to them. On the other hand, art is sometimes merely an interpretation of what the artist sees. This is where the message can be distorted via the use of colours to represent moods, or the portrait can become an abstract version (an obvious example of this would be Picasso's later works.)

Carl Andre's Article VIII was mired in controversy when the sculpture was first revealed at London's Tate Gallery in 1972. The gallery had bought the piece for £2,297, although detractors noted that it seemed to be a pile of bricks. But this 'pile of bricks' has since become an iconic piece of modern art, imbued with meaning far beyond its physical structure. According to the Tate curators, this was the whole point. Andre's work celebrates the unassuming beauty in everyday objects, from masonry to balconies to the tranquil surface of a lake. Just because the artistic merit of a subject is subtle, or open to individual interpretation, in no way means it is any less relevant than something more obvious, like one of Titian's lurid mythological studies.