Dave Barry published a mildly funny rant on Modern Art a month and a half ago (but I just got the link last night from my karate instructor). Basically, it's "the emporer has no clothes" -- this art that professional art appreciators pay so much money for, Barry claims, is shit, is nothing, is empty and sterile (or not).What is the public value of a work that can only be appreciated by somebody immersed in the social and historical context of the art world?

Appreciating minimalist art seems to me to be a very intellectualized endeavor -- if you know how one artist influenced another, you can compare a canvas painted all over in a single colour to a canvas painted in two colours and see the sheer extravagance of the second.

Terence Spies is the guy who started to introduce me to this extremely intellectualized appreciation of art, and sometimes I can grok it. In his not-recently-updated blog, you can see this tendency in a different realm -- a greater appreciation of certain food from an intellectual understanding of the processes and ingredients that go into it.