Why Even Bother?

We went to San Antonio for New Year's. We went downtown to the celebration on New Year's Eve, then went to Sea World on New Year's Day. We stayed in a hotel NYE night, and I couldn't help but notice their framed pieces of art on the wall. It was actually my daughter who pointed them out, the one that is an artist. She said, "What is that picture? Is it or tree? Is it anything other than one quick splash of paint from a big brush?"

Whatever it was, it wasn't very pleasing to the eye. a random shape, some drippy paint, all one color, why bother to frame that and put it on the wall? I've been to a lot of hotels over the years, and they all had better wall decorations than this.

I went into the bathroom, and this was on the wall above the toilet.

If art is so simple that even I could make it in about three minutes, then it's probably not worth bothering with if you ask me.

Then above the bed, there were these two.

These ones were probably the laziest. My kids made better art when they were fingerpainting at two years old.

Not only that, but if you look, they put those picture up right next to each other, with the frames actually touching, and directly above the headboard of the bed so that they looked like they were resting on it, but they weren't, they were actually hung there like that. It was so weird.

I couldn't help looking at that crappy art and thinking, "Was this really better than just buying a poster print of some nice photograph of nature or a cityscape or anything like that? Did they pay somebody for this art or did the guy who built the hotel decide to decorate the thing himself, but didn't realize just how many paintings he would need so he made the simplest ones possible to fill all the necessary spaces in time?"

I don't know, but I really don't understand modern art. I'm pretty sure this stuff isn't considered good modern art even among modern art snobs, but I don't understand the good stuff either. It would have been nice to have some beauty to look at instead of this nothing.