Saifedean Ammous, writing in The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking:
A stroll through a modern art gallery shows artistic works whose production requires no more effort or talent than can be mustered by a bored 6-year-old. Modern artists have replaced craft and long hours of practice with pretentiousness, shock value, indignation, and existential angst as ways to cow audiences into appreciating their art, and often added some pretense to political ideals, usually of the puerile Marxist variety, to pretend-play profundity. To the extent that anything good can be said about modern “art,” it is that it is clever, in the manner of a prank or practical joke. There is nothing beautiful or admirable about the output or the process of most modern art, because it was produced in a matter of hours by lazy talentless hacks who never bothered to practice their craft. Only cheap pretentiousness, obscenity, and shock value attract attention to the naked emperor of modern art, and only long pretentious diatribes shaming others for not understanding the work give it value.
As the Medicis have been replaced with the artistic equivalents of DMV workers, the result is an art world teeming with visually repulsive garbage produced in a matter of minutes by lazy talentless hacks looking for a quick paycheck by scamming the world’s aspirants to artistic class with concocted nonsensical stories about it symbolizing anything more than the utter depravity of the scoundrel pretending to be an artist who made it. Mark Rothko’s “art” took mere hours to produce, but was sold to gullible collectors holding millions of today’s unsound money, clearly solidifying modern art as the most lucrative get‐rich‐quick scam of our age. No talent, hard work, or effort is required on the part of a modern artist, just a straight face and a snobby attitude when recounting to the nouveau riche why the splatter of paint on a canvas is anything more than a hideous thoughtless splatter of paint, and how their inability to understand the work of art unexplained can be easily remedied with a fat check.