Does Modern Art Make Any Sense!?

Modern art is one of those topics, like cryptocurrency or the British railway timetable, where everyone pretends to understand what’s going on while secretly hoping nobody asks them to explain it. 

You can be standing in a gallery, staring at what appears to be a large canvas painted entirely beige, and the person next to you will lean in and whisper, “It’s about the fragility of the human condition,” as if this is obvious. Meanwhile, you’re thinking: It looks like the wall. Are we sure this isn’t the wall?

The problem is that modern art has escaped the traditional boundaries of “things that look like things.” Back in the old days, art involved recognisable objects such as fruit, or horses, or people who looked mildly annoyed. You could point at a painting and say, “That’s a bowl of apples,” and nobody would argue. Now you point at something and say, “Is that a bowl of apples?” and the curator informs you that it’s actually a commentary on late‑stage capitalism, and also you’re holding the fire extinguisher.

I once visited a modern art museum where one of the exhibits was literally a pile of bricks. Not a sculpture of bricks. Not a painting featuring bricks. Just… bricks. The kind you might find behind a B&Q. People were standing around nodding thoughtfully, as if the bricks were about to reveal the secrets of the universe. I tried nodding too, but all I could think was: If this is art, then my garage is a masterpiece.

Another exhibit was a video installation consisting of a man staring into the camera while slowly eating a cabbage. For forty‑five minutes. I’m not saying it wasn’t profound, but I am saying that at one point I genuinely wondered if the cabbage was going to get an agent.

The thing is, modern art often comes with long, extremely serious descriptions printed on the wall. These descriptions are written in a special dialect known as “Curator,” which is like English but with all the meaning removed. For example:

“This work interrogates the liminal tension between presence and absence.”

Translation:  

“We don’t know either.”

Or:

“The artist invites the viewer to participate in a dialogue with the object.”

Translation:  

“Please don’t touch it, it cost £80,000.”

And then there’s performance art, which is modern art’s way of saying, “You thought the bricks were weird? Hold my ethically sourced craft beer.” Performance art can be anything: a person screaming into a bucket, a woman dressed as a traffic cone reciting poetry, or a man lying on the floor pretending to be a fax machine. The audience watches in silence, trying to decide whether this is a bold exploration of identity or whether the performer simply lost a bet.

Of course, the real mystery of modern art is the price. You’ll see a sculpture that looks like someone dropped a toaster into a bowl of spaghetti, and the label will say: £240,000. At this point you begin to suspect that the entire art world is an elaborate prank designed to see how far they can push it before someone says, “Hang on.”

But here’s the thing: despite all the confusion, the baffling descriptions, the cabbage‑eating, and the bricks, modern art does make a kind of sense. Not the normal kind of sense, like “gravity” or “don’t microwave tinfoil,” but the kind of sense that says: “Look, life is weird, people are weird, and sometimes the best way to express that is by gluing a bicycle wheel to a chair.”

Modern art isn’t trying to be understood. It’s trying to make you feel something — even if that something is “mild panic” or “I could have done this.”

And honestly? That’s sort of wonderful.

Because if a pile of bricks can be art, then maybe everything has the potential to be meaningful. Even your garage.

Especially your garage.