It's money laundering

Give Pollock crap all you want, but the guy popularized one of the most fun painting techniques ever, regardless of how you feel about his stuff.

Seriously, splatter painting is really fun to do even if there's no real reason to it, and if anything, who says art has to have a reason behind it? Just straight-up having a play around throwing paint on something (in fact, there are entire places dedicated to that exact thing cropping up over the last few years) is as valid as drawing a scene out with an actual story behind it.

I just like the way it looks.

Sir, I laughed and upvoted. I am unable to share as my wife is a visual arts grad and I want to be able to get laid in the future.

Those art pieces are literally poison to a young aspiring artist's mind. It condemns them to a life in poverty, chasing dreams of becoming high profile abstract-postmodernist-whatever artist selling shits in jars, instead of focusing on making what the world really needs the most:

Can't tell which people hate more, the art, the artist, or the admirers of the work.

Regardless of how people feel about Pollock's work, there was art before expressionism and art after. He and others undeniably changed the conversation about art forever.

Still better than AI art.

My favorite thing about art is that if you look at it and you hate it, that's still a completely valid take

Art museums became way more fun once I realized that

Yeah, yeah op. You have no idea of the what's and why's or any context for why plenty of modern art looks like it does and why it is important in art history. You know what you like. And you like what you understand. And if you don't understand it, you feel intellectually lesser and have a knee jerk reaction to protect yourself - by taking a meme format that says you have all the smarts and people that understand it are below yourself.

You can keep doing that, or you can get curious and ask the what's and the why's and see if you can appreciate things from it that aren't immediately obvious. That is how people grow.

Say what you want about this meme, but it sure as shit sparked a debate.

I like it. Generally, when abstract and contemporary art is well executed, I find it to be thought provoking and exciting to experience. One of my personal favourite paintings is Asger Jorn's "Stalingrad".

It is entirely useless to look at that painting on a tiny screen on a search engine because it looks like shit online.

However, in real life, you enter the room where it is hanging and it is HUGE. Whites and blacks and blues ans yellows and reds in a turbulent mix on the canvas and if you sit down on the bench and soak it in, you start to feel the emotions Jorn was trying to evoke in the viewer. War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.

I'm always exhausted when I look at that painting, but I do it every single time I'm at the Asger Jorn museum.

There definitely is shitty abstract and contemporary art out there. I have seen my fair share of bullshit pieces, but it is sad to me how some people entirely close themselves off to this aspect of art just because it is different. But, at the end of the day it is a taste thing, and that is okay.

Pollock is popular because of this exact thing. He "challenged" the idea of art as the Dada movement had done. You can absolutely hate it but like Warhol it made conversations and questions about process and astetics. By making a meme about it you have in fact thought about what art is and aesthetics you prefer. A Pollock painting made you do that.

People saying he do not select colors or use technique is just false. He would use a pulley system for large scale canvases and spread the colors quite purposefully. Remember this is the time of "happenings" like applying body paint and rolling on canvases, cutting up the canvas and applying newsprint, burning things, etc.

I don't even like Pollock but not to recognize him in museums within a moment of abstract expression would be a disservice. I've had plenty of students say. "I could paint that!". But there are two points they always misunderstand. 1. Pollock was an established painter who drastically changed styles. Many artists show that they can paint or draw in the traditional style but choose to push what is even art. Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum. 2. Everyone who tries to replicate a Pollock typically just uses some random paints with some bushes and just sort of flings it around. If you actually look at a Pollock in person up close. Yes you can see unevenness is created from not having full control of the paint on the brush but thought seems to go into exactly where the paint will land so that you have even coverage or at angles with different brushes. They is motion in how the paint drips. I can say that many of them I've seen are very much not "random" as you would think it would be.

Again I don't care for the work as there are plenty of other abstract expressions to choose from like Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler who used Pollock as an influence.

If you can find it, Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay for Esquire called “Jack the Dripper” which was reprinted in his essay collection Fates Worse than Death. He argues that Pollock was a) absolutely able to produce quality traditional art and b) accessing his sub- and unconscious mind when making drip paintings in a way that anyone interested in the human mind should be fascinated by.