Hey, pog, that icicle star is cool. :-)

Anyway, I guess you can say for art the same thing Damon Knight said for science fiction: "SF is anything I point my finger to and say it's SF."

Bandolin, what would you say about Kazimir Malevich (or Malevitch, depending on transliteration)? Like this one. Or his Red Cavalry.

Or Klee and his Tunisian Gardens...

OTOH, I guess the first pic from the museum was an attempt to pull a Malevich. :-) So some of your points still stand. For instance, the problem is that quite a lot of "revolutionary" stuff, like Malevich's black square or black circle were really revolutionary at the time, regardless of the fact that that they were not 1 nor 3. (I would be very cautious with representing ideology, unless you want to get something like the Soviet Social Realism. It had basically no value except its ideological content. And every ideology goes to the Hell of Ideas, sooner or later.)

But immitators were quite detrimental to their perceived value. Just like they were detrimental to the value of Hemingway's style, which is now perceived as base and uninteresting. Or Pollock, when now you have zillions of people splattering paint on paper and calling themselves artists. Not a single one of them has the vision, freshness and innovativeness of Malevich, Hemingway, Pollock.

BTW, the second pic looks like a good attempt at new primitivism, and might be even worth something in artistical regard.

Hm. When I read what I wrote, doesn't exactly seem we disagree. :-) But I will still leave it.

Incidentally, forget the dreariness of theoretical texts. Read Robertson Davies's novel What's Bred in the Bone, which I have already mentioned here. He does a great explanation of why modern art looks like it does.

-- erlik