I am sitting in a museum gallery full of art works that were painted with supplies that could be easily purchased from a local home improvement store. Requisite materials include at most two to three cans of paint, rollers, and masking tape. As I sit here, I am listening to college kids wax rhapsodic about modernism in art and music. This was their assignment, and they have labored mightily.

Across the various musicians, they uniformly spout the same flavor of partially digested verbal diarrhea that was served to them in their classroom environments by the anointed among the professoriate. They share the same tropes about the abstractness allowing art to be being deeply personal, different, elegant, and so on. Each focuses on being different by using key concepts that ultimately fit into the unifying theme of the night; the theme of, “if you don’t get it, you’re too dumb to part of the elite.”

A large number of the students outward appearance is geared towards expressing their independence from convention. Their uniqueness compared with the crowd. They seem to want us to admire them for standing alone and unafraid against the assailants of convention and conformity. In doing so, they all fit the prevailing convention and conform to the dominant norms. They conform neatly in their nonconformity, and in so doing they reinforce the walls of the ivory tower.

Each performance I listen to represents one of the students’ attempts to “break the mold” and be different by copying the rule breaking of another. Most just succeed in creating noise. One, in particular, seems to me the music you would get if you asked a deaf mathematician to compose an interesting piece of music. I sit here with my own “deeply personal” experience mostly limited to disgust and a deep sense of “otherness” imposed on me by the fact that I haven’t succumbed to the captivating preaching of modern art’s version of Jim Jones. I haven’t consumed the Kool-Aid so to speak.

I actually enjoyed Liz’s composition. Clearly Liz doesn’t really understand abstractionism, since there was some structure within her piece to give the listener something to find beyond whatever happens to emerge from the vacant space created by the absence of actual art. That is a big part of why I liked it.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim ignorance as a shield. I helped somewhat with editing the narrative that Liz and her partner presented. I can sing along to the siren song of modern art. I understand what it is that I’m supposed to see in this kind of presentation or performance. But knowing the lingo and arguments doesn’t make me an adherent. This emperor is naked. The vast majority of the art within my current environment, visual or aural, is void of that which makes meaning, or so I claim. But that means nothing to the anointed.

I am the unwashed. My lack of appreciation for meaninglessness, or, better stated, my inability to see deep meaning where it isn’t inherently present, gives the anointed the right to discount my views. They are free to mock my ignorance and congratulate themselves on their sophistication. Where I see a fat, weak, hairy, ugly diseased old man strutting naked through the streets, they see gilded robes of richest purple adorning a king.

I believe there are those who can hallucinate a royal robe and crown onto a naked man. Some do indeed find significant meaning and joy in the cacophony of light and sound. However, I believe they are far fewer than we are led to believe. I’m certain a great many of the people I’ve encountered in the art world, and they are many, endorse the views of the anointed for fear of being ostracized as the unwashed. They seem afraid to speak the quiet part out loud.

Unlike in the parable of the emperor’s new clothes, pointing out the emptiness and absence of meaning makes no impact. That lack of significance is a feature that they cling to, and punt the responsibility for creating meaning away from the artist. Pointing it out only emboldens them to mount their ivory towers and condemn you as an ignoramus.

In what other discipline can you gain adherents and praise for creating emptiness and nothingness? I hate modern abstractionism.