Modern art and poetry'

[Squirrel]

Modern art and poetry' ...Are they fake? What I mean is, when an artist paints a picture of say, a yellow squiggle, covered in green and blue diamonds, and then roughly scribbles a toddler-like image of a house on top, are they really producing a work of art, or did they just throw it together in 10 minutes? And poets, writing something straight out of a thesaurus, like: 'The mahogany blueprint of a cello-like whale squirpled around in irony like an arrangement of bumblebees' (OK so I made that up but it really can get that bad) ' surely they don't put thought into that rubbish? I can usually appreciate the time and effort that people put into creating a great metaphor in a sentence, or skilfully adding rhyme to a poem, or painting a beautiful landscape, but this modern stuff evades me. I can give you an example of what I mean: when I was about 12, we had to write a poem about rain. Being a great liker of rhyme I immediately set to work on writing several verses of miscellaneous stuff to do with rain, keeping the flow and rhyme as good as I could manage, which led to me getting my work returned unmarked because 'A poem doesn't have to rhyme.' I was so angry (because it had taken me hours) that I hastily scribbled down the worst piece of **** poem you have ever seen, with many repeated phrases and words like 'tumbling' and 'swirling', handed it in and got an A'where is the sense in that?

So my main point is, are people all over the world looking at modern art and actually pretending to like it and understand it? I'm not saying all of it is mindless scribble, but there have been cases of modern art hanging upside down, for heaven's sake, and no one noticing. It's believable, though, pretending for so long to appreciate the hidden intricacy of ink blots (no doubt to fit in with the crowd), that eventually you think you do.

Any thoughts on this matter would be great, thanks for reading!

[Squirrel]

It sounds like an example of "Uh oh, I don't like that painting - no, I mean I don't understand that painting - but everyone else seems to love that kind of thing so I'll just blend in and say it's brill."