A senior studio art major show at my college was kind of a hodgepodge of bullshit and good stuff. The absolute worst was a series of highly conceptual pieces that were apparently a commentary on gender, sexuality and 9/11 which culminated in a performance piece which consisted of the artist, in clown make-up, dancing in front a projection of the WTC falling while red paint dripped from his fingers. The best deliberately invoked this trope - from a distance, they looked like wrinkled pieces of paper, and the only reason why I went up to look at them was because I was so angry that the artist had decided they were good enough to display in the gallery. Up close, however, they were covered in highly intricate patterns drawn in white colored pencil that was only visible very close up, forcing both a real emotional reaction from me and making me engage with the piece on a deeper level than I would have otherwise.

I hate much of Modern art. I see a TON of Modern art because my sister (a Fine-arts major at USC, halfway to her B.A.) needs to go to museums for class, or just wants to see the art. Most of the time, I'm underwhelmed (rare occaisions I'll be impressed, such as a series of paintings where the artist let a movie title guide his additions), and my sister is impressed. Except for Eva Hesse. My lord, we saw an Eva Hesse exhibit. As we were walking out, my sister said, "That was shit.". We could agree, art is incomprehensible.

Also from above troper, I overheard a friend once trying to justify modern art by saying it was made because it needed to be made. "Art for art's sake"... (Anyone who played Civ4 remembers) "...is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the good, art for the sake of the true and the beautiful... That is the art that I wish to make." That'd be too complex for him, so I shortened it to a common motivator: Money. Most artists enjoy their job and also do it because there's potential to make BANK. It shut him up, proving that he obviously didn't know Dada (which is this trope incarnate and would have justified him).

this troper totally understands you, i'm more practically minded i enjoy big fancy machines over anything, i would much rather have a cut out of a jet engine on my wall than what they pass off as "art" these days. i had a hilarious idea a while ago where i would paint a white canvas white, then give it a fancy name, it's dedication is to the amount of bullsh*t i could spout to get some idiot to pay out their ears for it.

As a fan of a lot of contemporary art, I would like to thank Andy Warhol (and some previous artists) for blurring the line between artistic and gimmicky. I mean that without an ounce of sarcasm. I do, however, think that there's really just a small minority of contemporary artists who give the entire thing a bad reputation - the Young British Artists spring to my mind first (although I don't doubt that some people do enjoy their art, and I don't hold that against them). To me, part of the joy of contemporary art, or contemporary thinking in art, is the understanding that you can understand it however you want.

This troper loves all art. There is no "high" or "low" art. Just "art". When people challenge a piece's credibility as "art", I note how from the perspective of alien beings, all human made "art" would be equally nonsensical. That all paintings are but crushed pigment on canvas, that all sculpture is mangled metal and rock on a plinth, that movies are a blurry projection of a thousand photographs, that music is noise, and that storytelling is even duller noise. But then I would also note that it's also OK for people to have these feelings. Art affects everybody differently. Sometimes, the art has no effect at all. That's OK too. I just don't like it when people try to be pedants and declare for others what can be art or not, or how spoken "bullshit" is not enough to make something "art". Art isn't about just what we can see or hear; it's about what we feel! Some people just forget that things don't have to be "beautiful" to be ''beautiful''.

As far as This Troper is concerned, you sir, speak some serious-ass truth.

This troper remembers when a wall in his basement had two posters placed on it by his mother for a party to mock this. One was of a nice art scene with a price of two cents. The other was of a blank piece of white paper with a $50,000 price. A family joke was made that the white paper was of a polar bear in a snowstorm.

In this troper's family the last slide of a family slide show with no picture is described as this.

This troper has heard (although isn't sure) that there's a museum somewhere where they are actually displaying three blank canvases. And they're calling it art ''why!?''

SF-MOMA. They claim it shows "empty space". MY ARSE!

Although all of that was ripped off from Robert Rauschenberg, who painted three canvases with special white gloss paint so they would ''slightly'' relfect the viewer - the point being that the viewing experience would be different every instant that you looked at it. The thousands of imitators missed the point completely.

This troper, an art student, once passed an installation art oriented course with the highest possible grade... mostly by recording random things on a video camera and then projecting the footage on some more random things. These works had absolutely no other point or meaning than to fulfill their respective assignments. Granted, the final project of that course ''did'' gradually morph into a thought-out piece of work, but even then was a thing of little effort.

Well, did it look cool?

This troper, also an art student, has nothing but respect for the likes of Warhol, Duchamp, Rauschenberg and Pollock, because they were the first people to ''think of it''. The countless imitators? No respect whatsoever. My story though is similar to the above - I had to create a piece of conceptual sculpture, so I got a kitchen sink, attached a showerhead to it and hung spoons off it. Because it ''looked cool''. My art teacher knew this the whole time, and thankfully thought it was hilarious.

This troper shamelessly blames Picasso for starting this entire "abstract art" business, making this OlderThanTelevision.

This troper would blame the Post-Impressionists for influencing the Cubists and Fauves, but she likes them. After reading about Abstract Expressionism and De Stijl, though, she would like to lend her full support to Dada. "Art is dead, long live Dada!"

The precedents are even older. ''Par example'', Les Arts Incohérents.

This contributor recalls hearing a story about a piece of abstract art entered into an art competition. It won. When asked for the artist to step up and receive their prize, a women gently placed her two-year old child on the stage. The judges asked her if she was joking. She was not. This contributor is unfortunately unsure as to whether or not this is true, but he sure hopes it is.

This troper remembers that too! It made the newspapers in Britain a few years ago. The painting was just some blobs of paint that had been allowed to run, and it was entered under the title "An Impressionist View of a Group of Trees".

This troper took a "beginning drawing" class in college lo these many years ago, having somehow convinced someone in his university's art department that he had the bare minimum of talent to qualify. Unfortunately, that's all he had, which resulted in a great deal of criticism from the instructor. The only time he got an "A" on a project was the day he got fed up, took a brush and a bottle of india ink, and started mechanically stamping a gridwork of brush prints across a two-foot-by-three-foot sheet of paper simply to occupy himself until class ended.

This troper, unable to make the film she really wanted for lack of resources and coming up hard against a deadline, went to the beach and drew random designs in the sand, filmed it, and edited the results together with gratuitous sound effects, especially the boi-oi-oing one. While the instructor for the class was well known as a pushover when it came to grades and the troper had put a serious effort into the other two films that constituted the coursework, she's still amazed that she got an A for the class.

Particularly frustrating to this troper when taking various artistic classes in hopes of an easy grade thanks to an already well talented hold on traditional art, only managed to actually get anything higher than a D when he took a white canvas, some motor oil, and proceeded to make two lines on it all the while making up something regarding my soul and past, to bemuse myself. That piece got an almost perfect grade.

Actually, This Troper's getting away with it, due to a complete inability to draw and a rather obsessive-compulsive need to. It actually takes a surprising amount of effort to be incomprehensible.

This troper once did a video for the art class that consited of him filming random stuff around the school. He passed with high grades, but then again, the teacher was a pushover and gave pretty much everybody high grades as long as the dre or filmed something.

This troper had a friend who went to an art museum (I think in Ottawa) where she found a painting called the Wall of Fire. The painting was made up of a blue background and two vertical orange lines. People claimed that if you look closely, you can actually see "fire". The troper's friend, like every other sane person, could not. And the painting was bought for a lot of money. Yeah...

''Voices'' of Fire. It's in the National Gallery of Canada, since apparently there was nothing more worthwhile to spend money on that day. To get the "fire" effect, what you need to do is stare very hard at it, and then wait long enough for your eyes to go all screwy. Some would argue that the same technique will work with just about anything. Those people clearly aren't true artists.

ThisTroper's current 2D design professor claims she met Salvador Dali when she was a child. You can add ''True Artists are Incomprehensible''. That, and she could only focus on his mustache.

This troper and her friends draw weird doodles. She particularly gets asked what her weird drawings are. Thing is, she's not telling *sticks tounge out*, so ha. And people have made a game out of guessing what they are.

Not the standard tale, but related; This Troper picked a sculpture by miniature sculptor Willard Wigan for her project. Because his art doesn't have any depth to it and he's still famous because he can make a sculptures literally the size of a speck of dust, most of my time was spent thinking up variations on "There is no meaning. It's just a tiny Homer Simpson," because most of the questions were variations on "What is the meaning of this piece?"

Whenever this troper writes poems, he goes out of his way to avoid this. He has yet to write a poem that has any meaning aside from the extremely obvious and blatantly stated. He steadfastly refuses to write free verse. One might argue that TrueArtIsIncomprehensible is a BerserkButton.

This troper has a tendency to doodle when bored. To her seventh-grade art teacher, these creations are daringly symbolic of inner turmoil, studies in repitition and subtle inversion of modern gender ideals. To everybody else, it's a page full of black and white line drawings of eyes, a bunch of ordinary keys over and over again filled in with watercolor, a skull I doodled after tracing around a quarter with big front teeth, and a painfully skinny clown with a playing card in his mouth. Mmm, hidden meaning.

This troper bitterly envies you. Her art teacher was convinced that anything she drew had no meaning just by virtue of its being a cartoon.

Alas, this art major only wishes she could get away with this with such ease.

This troper was painting what was intended as a still life for an when he was tripped by a fast-moving cat and fell face-first into a wet canvas. Since he didn't feel like putting a new one together, he submitted it as is with a dent and a mass of smeared paint shaped like a human forehead, titled it ''A Physical Manifestation Of The Artist's Frustration'', and got an A.

Maybe they thought it represented a HeadDesk.

This troper once went to a museum of modern art that featured, among other things, a Russian bathroom stall door, some swearing puppets, and a white stone with milk on it. He asked the guide about the symbolism of the stone with milk on it, thinking the whiteness of it might've have something to do with purity or some such stuff. The answer he got was "Oh, it's a stone with milk on it."

This Tropers brother workd at an modern art gallery, and we both joke about these works (but also respect the better ones). One time, there was a performance art display at the museum, with the expected oddities. This Troper liked the guy who just kept writing gibberish on a plywood cube with a black marker, and in turn disliked the too obvious work of a guy standing still holding an empty protest placard. As for own work, you know frustrating it is to have someone admire your piece of work, while ''it's upside down''. Mostly TT does surreal and postmodernist stuff, but avoids staight abstract.

This troper's brother is currently an art student, and has been berated by his abstract art teacher because, approximate quote, "your trees look like trees." Granted, it's abstract art, but if they're supposed to be ''trees'', one would think that being ''identifiable as trees'' would not be a bad thing.

This troper's art teacher had the tendency to give As only for works made five minutes before the class. The best example: this troper had to illustrate a poem and include the poem itself in the illustration. He had a page full of old doodles and sketches and some colored lines. He threw some random kanjis in the top left corner, "translated" it to a dadaist haiku, gave it some title like "Our chaotic world", attributed it to the famous contemporary poet "Bakana Geijutsuno Sensei" (Arts Teacher) and submitted it. His class had a hard time withholding the laughs as the teacher praised it as the greatest work of arts in that year. He got an A+ and the "work" was displayed as part of the exposition on the walls of the school's corridor. Then this troper's physics teacher who knew some basic Japanese and hated the arts teacher alongside with the contemporary "arts" noticed it and broke off in a maniacal laughter.

Your school sounds ''awesome''.

This troper likes to tell the girl he has a crush on that her favorite singer (Villi Vallo of the band H.I.M.) is a woman. So, one day, he sent her a text message consisting of a TrueArtIsIncomprehensible poem where all the capital letters spelled out "Villi Vallo is a woman". The response he got? "Where's that from?". Following me saying "I made it up", she texts back "That's neat". She didn't even see my secret message. It's awesome.

This troper is constantly given somewhat moronic interpretive art projects in her english classes, and it is usually a requirement that they are abstract art pieces. One time, this troper was penalized for having a project that was "too abstract." She's pretty sure that that teacher was fired the next year.

This Troper acted in a play in which an apple left on a pedestal by a janitor/aspiring artist was analyzed and critiqued by parodies of movie critics Siskel, Ebert, and Roeper, The Three Stooges, and a lunatic in a trenchcoat (played by yours truly). Of course, no one realized that the janitor had just left the apple there for his lunch break, and they all left in varying degrees of appreciation before he returned and unceremoniously ate it.

At this troper's college, one student's final art project, displayed in the public gallery, was toilet paper. Around fifty rolls of toilet paper, stacked on top of and next to each other. Still in the wrapping.

In This Troper's creative writing classes, most of the pieces that get written are chain-of-consciousness monologues or free verse poems, where as he writes narratives. Guess who gets more praise. I suppose it's easier to find fault with something if you understand it. Also happened in a drawing and painting class, where I was docked points on one of my illustrations (a self-portrait in a cartoony style) because it looked 'too much like The Simpsons'.

This troper's sister entered a Christian fine arts competition under the "sculpture" category. Her submission was a sculpture of a dragon with each scale made individually. It was modeled after a dragon from a book, and looked almost exactly like it. It got an honorable mention. When her sister asked what was wrong with her sculpture and why it did not do well, the only helpful thing the art critic that was there had to give her was something along the lines of, "It didn't have any Biblical significance." What was the piece that won, then, you ask? ...A poorly glued-together, bright red, high-heeled sandal with a block of wood wrapped in nylon sitting in it.

Oh, come on. The high-heeled sandal ''obviously'' represents Jesus in purgatory. *flees*

The putz said ''a dragon had no Biblical significance!?'' Has this critic ever actually ''read'' Revelation?

Say, was the dragon possibly made from crystal?

ThisTroper was assigned to make a poster representing the underlying themes of Shakespeare's ''Macbeth'' for a high school English class; an assignment which he blew off until five minutes before class, when -- on a whim -- he decided to turn in a blank piece of paper, explaining that it represented the title character's nihilistic world view. The teacher liked it so much that she not only gave it full credit, but also hung it on the wall.

ThisTroper knew an 'appliance sculptor' who had mangled chunks of gadgets around his apartment. Visually interesting, but I asked him what one piece meant. He said, "That's a CD player." He took a small round disc off the front and clamped a CD onto the sculpture with it, then pressed an unidentifiable button. Music started booming out of two bulky towers on either side of it. Guess it doesn't have to mean anything if it's functional, or if RuleOfCool applies.

The people at the high school that this troper went to, the general preference among students in stories, music, film, and every form of art was SoBadItsGood. I.E. they preferred it to SoCoolItsAwesome. One time, the people in the grade 12 Writer's Craft class had to write a script for the Drama class's end of year play. The winner was a murder mystery with wooden, repetitive dialogue and the culprit's motive never established. When I asked the writer if it was a parody or not he said that it had been deliberately terrible, as he didn't want his writing to be performed, and that he though that my script was the best. This might make more sense if you know that this was a very small private school, about 50 people total.

This troper's university has an installation art piece consisting of a large (forty-foot by twenty-foot) corregated steel sheet placed at a slant on top of eight steel posts. Most people don't realize that it's art -- they just figure it's something left over from a School of Engineering project. Unlike most incomprehensible art, it does have redeeming value: it makes a dandy rain shelter.

This troper and her ex-fiance once had fun mocking a Jackson Pollack by looking at it from ''the side''. We decided the peaks and valleys of paint spatters looked like moon mountains and were more interesting than the front of the canvas.

At the same art museum, there was a weird room full of strange objects including but not limited to: some pieces of window glass leaning against a wall, a computer monitor showing a blank white screen, a spotlight turned on a cast iron garden bench, a plumb-bob resting on a silver fruit platter, a four-by-four-by-five-foot wooden beam sticking out of a wall, some computer motherboards in picture frames, and half the floor covered in sand. Add to this, the room was unlit except for some strategically placed spotlights. And it was next to an elevator motor room which lacked sound-proofing; the whine and howl of the motors somehow adding to the weirdness.

At this troper's university, we animation and illustration majors tend to write off the fine arts and studio arts majors as victims of this trope. (We don't feel too bad because they similarly look down on us for actually trying to make money with our work.) This troper likes to inspect new student exhibitions when they go up in the arts building. She genuinely enjoys the few pieces with good design, while chuckling at the pretentiousness of the rest.

I was once in a technology class for high school where we used computers to write music. The stuff I made was basically just a bunch of random notes put together (GOD I hated that class). I told the teacher it was avant-garde or something equally stupid and I got a B.

This troper really loves this trope despite not being an artist.

This troper was actually introduced to {{Daria}} in Jr. High by having fun with this and TrueArtIsAngsty. One assignment was to give a piece of art that is supposed to represent something and he once took a bunch of prismacolour pencils, scribbled all over the sheet and said it was a post modernist deconstruction of a person trapped in a K-hole while conveniently holding his set of PrismaColour pencils. The teacher actually gave him a "B+" because she spent a few minutes laughing at the completely random and pretentious title.

But the best one was when we were supposed to draw art that was to represent a message about society. I drew a person looking like the world was about to end in front of him saying "Life sucks but I am still having more fun divining hidden meanings of this piece than you will enjoying this you phillistine!" and thought of just about ''every'' stereotype for those kinds of artists, including the hat (Which this troper actually wears) and giving him a nice "Phillistine" garb. When asked what it meant by the teacher, he said that it was an interpretation of a modern artist who believes that the only way to truly enjoy art is to analyze hidden meanings and quibble about what it stands for, how it speaks to you and not what it truly is, truly making himself become the phillistine he claims he's not under his artist angsty exterior. The teacher gave him an "A" for such an elaborate description, powerful message, and then introduced him to "Daria", saying that I would get that show a lot. That was perhaps the best art class I ever took.

A writing class this troper also took in high school asked for a project to which he wrote a completely demented Ranma fanfic that had numerous students laughing at how random it was and the teacher giggling and wondering whether or not I had been secretly putting Hallucinogenic drugs in my microwave Noodle Soup I had for lunch that day.

Said troper also has a story in the works where at times it's just incomprehensible because the narrator frequently argues with the characters and once refuses to describe what's going on so the characters literally travel a great distance in zero seconds before the narrator asks for them to let it narrate the adventures again.

This troper also got someone into an art school last year by taking some random items in a grocery store and putting them on the wrong shelf while she drew a (highly detailed) drawing of it. The items? He took an (empty) box of ice cream, set it and a magazine into the turkey cooler next to a box of unwanted Ramen.

This troper wasn't directly involved in this, but one art he saw involved a pair of hyperactive Chihuahuas running through a puddle of wet paint followed by a bunch of legos and paint brushes thrown onto the paper. IT actually auctioned off for $700 which wasn't that bad for something a sophomore in college did.

On a website I used to frequent, I was part of a group of people who used our user profiles and other such pages as a medium for this. Photographs, quotes, and song lyrics were taken out of context and put alongside parts of an original story so Mind Screw-ish that most of ''us'' didn't completely understand it. Links to other pages in the project were used liberally, and occasionally led to some pretty weird stuff even by our standards. Just as planned, this got the forums talking, with several people seeming to think that maybe this was some weird conspiracy or something equally ludicrous. I remember the girl who started it once explaining to me that it didn't mean much of anything at all, and she started doing it as a sort of experiment, to see if people would try to find meaning in something just because they couldn't understand it. And it worked even better than she expected.

Anyone who can tell this troper the name of the artist of a certain ... SOLID BLUE PAINTED CANVAS in the Modern Art section of the Met will have her undying gratitude. If she goes back and gets a closer look at the plaque, she's pretty sure she'll lose control and start ripping the thing to shreds. She STRONGLY believes that something like ... THAT ... has no business being in the same building as a van Gogh. Sometimes, Modern 'Art' makes her very, very angry indeed.

For this very reason, that is this troper's favorite painting in the met. It's even called Blue Panel!

The artist is Yves Klein if I recall correctly. Have fun.

This Troper is a Gun Nut. One of his favorite hobbies is going to the Firing Range and either trying to improve his scores with his preferred calibers, or trying something new. At his current job, he tends to hang recent target sheets on the wall of an office to contemplate how he can improve. One time, an Intern walked into his office, and stared at the hung target sheet. #QUOTE# Intern: Wow, Mr. (Last Name Omitted), this must mean the inability of man to wish to damage another, right? #QUOTE# Me: No, it means I shot a two-sixty on a five hundred course with an unfamiliar weapon, and I obviously need improvement. #QUOTE# Intern: I mean, it just speaks to the soul! The way the heart is unpierced. #QUOTE# (At this point I didn't know if he was making fun of me or not) Me: You do realize I did that at the firing range three days ago, right? #QUOTE# Intern: You did this! You're a real artist! #QUOTE# Me: Get out!

Since then... I have not hung a single target sheet in my office. That intern no longer works with us, and while This Troper wishes he had something to do with that... sadly, I didn't.

I had to write a myth of some sorts, but because my family would never leave the room I was doing the thing in, I had to rush it when they were gone. So I wrote some thing about a person who had a lot of changes, alternated between calling the person him and her, and threw in a meaning as an afterthought. My teacher loved it.

I made this this for fun. I then decided to put it up so people can analyse it, because I sure can't figure it out.

Both of this troper's art professors routinely avert this trope. Mostly because they're more interested in the construction than some crazy symbolic hidden meaning reading. In short. We can usually get away with crazy projects under little more justification than the Rule of Cool

This troper had a very frustrating art class one year. Her professor could explain what he wanted you to draw four times, and still not make any sense. Well, one assignment we had was to, from what this troper could gather, draw a series of three pictures: a self-portrait, a drawing of something representing your dreams or hobbies or something similar, and a final, GIANT picture of a combination of the two. So... she drew the self-portrait, and, since she's an artist and a writer, drew her sketchbook (with pictures of her characters in it) and notebook (with one of her stories in it) for the "hobbies/dreams" part. For the third and final picture, she decided to be clever and drew herself holding her sketchbook open as various characters crawled out, starting as sketches and slowly becoming real things as they left the sketchbook; the notebook was on the floor, too, with characters crawling out of that, slowly turning from words describing the characters to the characters themselves. She was very proud of this, but when she turned it in to her professor, he stared at it blankly and asked what on earth the third picture had to do with the other two. Turned out that he wanted the third picture to LITERALLY combine the first two--basically taking random elements from the first two pictures and mish-mashing them in a totally nonsensical way. She never understood that professor.

Being a music major means being subjected to a lot of this. Let's just say that the so-called Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) and other musical developments that caused such a stir (with loads of both praise and backlash) in the first half of the tentieth century are considered ''conservative'' compared to what's out there now. Moreover, professors of composition can be highly adamant about the only worthy ideas being the newest ones. Yet to every listener who's not an "expert"...

All in this page is a Mona Lisa compared to what I did on my art class. I was joking aaround with my friends and decided to create the most stupid art piece ever, I drew Obama riding a unicorn, throwing rainbows from his eyes and hitting Hitler in the balls with a pair of chainsaw-nunchucks made of fire as Jesus says WHAT THE FUCK in the background. Needless to say, I won the contest. What I wasnt expecting was my teacher seeing it and deducting it meant how stupidity and ignorance could beat evil easier and intelligence and good. I got an A+.

You sir, get a CMOA.

I'm taking art and I know I'm crap because I'm sixteen and I can't draw realistically; meanwhile, there's a four-year-old who out-sketches the old masters in London. I constantly wonder why I get more attention from the people around me when there are others who can draw ''much'' better and deserve ''so much'' more. Then again, I don't draw for art. I design cartoon characters. I make comics. When I'm older I'll go into animation. I don't draw to replicate real life, I draw because I can communicate through it and because I can make people (barring haughty old art critics) happy through it and because it's ''fun''.

While I have no personal examples to contribute here, there is one thing I can say: Thanks to this page and all the examples, I guess I will never have problems in any arts class again. If other people can get away with this kind of stuff, I can too. It is important though that we never let an arts teacher, professor or the like see this page.

This Troper finds that people can be bit unreasonable about this. When on a school field trip to an art galley a man started ranting how an abstract piece wasn't TrueArt. When I defended it his rebuttal was to ''punch me square in the face''.

At This Troper's college, an art student put together some sort of "sculpture" that was essentially an odd-shaped and multicolored plywood shed, with a ladder sticking off the top of it, holding up a tv. Nobody is sure what the point is supposed to be, and the school paper actually ran an article mocking it, suggesting possible uses for it, which included "frisbee golf hole" and "place to sleep if you get locked out of your dorm". Needless to say, there are maybe 3 people on the entire campus actually care about the thing.

In her senior year of high school, this Troper was in an art class taught by a student teacher with only the loosest grasp on human proportion and linear perspective. The class was split into equal parts pretentiousness and glorified macaroni art. This troper simply handed in a different 'sketch I was doing anyway' for an entire year while she sat in the corner and quietly tried to teach herself how to use oil paint and watercolors, and was nearly driven to tears by the teachers unhelpfulness. Finally, for our final project, we were assigned to 'make a self portrait showing our true selves, not necessarily the outer one'. I took a picture of myself with a webcam, ran some grunge brushes and Photoshop filters on it, and scribbled a rather cynical, blunt description of myself on it in Sharpie. The teacher thought I was brilliant and gave me an A. I chewed her out as soon as I knew final grades had been submitted, and have never been more pleased to get in trouble.

Meta-example: This troper's sister (a musician) was studying in the Fine Arts building at her university one day, when someone else in the room got frustrated with a broken chair he'd been fiddling with/attempting to sit on, dramatically overturned it in the middle of the room, and loudly declared "This chair is ''art'' now because it's ''useless''!"

Subverted by this troper, majoring in art in highscool for four years. It was accepted there that you either present a work that you putt alot of thought into, is loved by fellow students and teachers alike, and all your friends and family members who have no interest in art will regard as this trope, or you can paint a pretty vase and get the opposite reaction. (except when your work is so bad no one likes it) After many works in both categories over the years, This Troper finally had an idea he deemed worthy for a final project which counts for a lot of your grade, and is presented in an exhibition which attracts about a thousand visitors each year (for 40~ students presenting. It's a very highly regarded school). The work he though of was close to minimalystic, with some features of [not going to bore you with it right now], and far from any pretty vase. It was also all black. (an an 11 foot tall statue, which you walk through) Based on that, he only hoped the work will be liked by peers (no even sure on that, mainly did what he did because he was passionate about it), and assumed most of the people he knows will regard it as this trope. When the exhibition opened, and that was one of a very few works praised both by people who take this trope seriously and by "vase people", it felt beyond the impossible.

I remember, while visiting an art museum in Pennsylvania (can't remember the name), seeing one room that had 8 works up on the walls. The exhibit claimed that they were an artists depiction of the 8 stages of TheOdyssey. My thoughts? A 3 year old had simultaneous access to several crayon packs and 8 canvases.

Subversion: this troper went to a modern art museum and liked it a lot.

This Troper was hustled out of an art gallery once - there was a move afoot to repair a skylight in one of the rooms, and this particular Troper thought it seemed like a good idea to put a label on the ladder and the pile of tools left behind. People were admiring it, too...

Now, I've been called "artsy", for some reason unbeknown to me. Seriously, I can draw a face at standard 3/4 angle, but like hell if I can make anything cool looking. Still, it's a label, and one that gets me dragged ''strange'' places (and also has given me some sort of Freudian hatred for overly used simple adjectives). For a nifty little course titled "Arts in the Cities", I got to go to all sorts of strange places and write reports about them. One of 'em, what was it, Franconia Sculpture Park or something? An hour drive to make it to...a park-sized lot with metal pipes randomly welded going up to the sky, a chain-fence mini-labrynth, and a barn made out to be what might only be a scene from Moonwalker, among others. Protip: when you can see the interstate from your "Sculpture Park", you're less than reputable. Though there was this delightful diner, ''The Dam Bistro'', my god, we had an eggplant sandwich and some chicken that was godly, as well as delicious fresh bistro chips. Wait, where am I going? Why, that's right! You want an uncomfortable story, too? For another project, I needed to go see an indie movie instead of an entertaining blockbuster. So there's one not too far away, and for this trip my mom decided to come with because she thought it might not be that bad. Have some abrupt points; they carded us to get in; grown woman heavier than me; five minutes of her siting around in a bathroom to bad music; ''she has nothing on but a see-through-nighty''. Yes, ''those things actually exist.'' God dammit, they exist. I'm pretty sure it's one of the few NoodleIncident I have.

Last year, this troper attended a film night at his high school as part of a bid to get into Film class, and had to sit through a pretentious half-hour of crap called "Hopscotch." It was filmed mostly in black and white, but with a few flashbacks done in oversaturated color. (The director probably thought she was subverting something with that.) There was no dialogue, and the plot was deliberately unclear and dragging, with some "minimalist" music playing over everything that kept on getting slower and slower, until it reached the credits, by which point it was SO SLOW that they had to hold each name in the credits for about five seconds just to stall for time (and feed their egos, I suppose). Even after the credits themselves were done, they held for about ten seconds on a black screen, waiting for the final note. And the worst part? The entire movie was nothing but a bunch of indie kids playing hopscotch with solemn expressions.

This troper has a joke with his dad that one could make modern art "by getting an insect to dip it's feet into a bottle of ink and have it run across the page." His friend agreed with it (and the friend took an Art A-level)!

My younger brother is taking Art 'O' Levels, and his examination piece is an abstract painting on the theme "bridges". He painted a beautiful piece that looks like something out of the Pandora forest of ''{{Avatar}}'', and displayed marvellous technique such as understandings of perspective, light, shading and so on. All in all, it's about just as pretty as if someone went to paint scenery of a mountain or a sunset - except (due to the abstract nature of the formations and structures he had painted), he didn't know how he was going to orientate the painting when he was done.

I started listening to TheResidents at age 14, and it shows. I have all manner of weird things from all over, ranging from plunderphonic comedy rock to glitch-shoegaze-prog-rock-metal-acid-math-rock-noise-jazz with accordions to the odd Spanish Noise CD. I don't have much unconventional art of my own; I'm not in a band, and my voice recorder ate itself a few months back.

In high school, we had an art show. Despite the many good and genuinely creative entries that depicted a number of subjects on many different mediums, the art teacher (who'd also appointed himself head judge of the show) selected a piece from one of his favorite students, that was literally no more than a single splash of black paint in the middle of a canvas to be the winner. The girl who made it claimed it represented "life."

According to the professor of a course I dropped, the poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a dark and angsty pastoral symbolizing... yeah. I got in trouble for pointing out that it's a poem about a guy trying to get under a girl's skirts.

Subverted by this troper, who decided to test whether her English teacher would fall for pseudointellectual gibberish or not and turned in a rambling, nonsensical essay. Her teacher's remark? Something to the effect of "good points, but structure needs work". In other words, I probably would have gotten top marks (for, mind you, babbling) if I'd bothered to put in things like paragraphs and an overarching structure.

This troper loves abstract and modern art, mainly because it's ''so fun'' to watch people freak out about how non-art it is. I remember reading somewhere (perhaps on this very site) that "If you have to ask whether or not it's art, then it's art." I agree fully.

This Troper kind of ''lives'' for this. I'm a huge fan of abstract and weird visual and performance art, as well as oddball experimental film and music. But sometimes... It's just pointless. And boring. For example, one of my friends made a short film for our local high-school film festival. Initially, I had collaborated with him on the idea, writing in what I thought was a fairly amusing subplot with a bit of a HeavyMeta edge, plus a reasonably fun self-effacing GainaxEnding. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, as well as the progressive disillusionment of the actors involved, 90% of said subplot - ''especially'' the parts that made it comprehensible and interesting - were removed, resulting in a film that oscillated between a weak (and weird) romance plot and bizarre interludes involving a girl reading a book. It made no sense whatsoever. Granted, it ''kind of'' worked at points - the soundtrack was good, and there are two brilliant {{One Scene Wonder}}s (one of which was played, without our knowledge, totally stoned) - but "kind of" doesn't exactly cut it...

In my hometown, the city council once spent a lot of money sticking huge black marble obelisks around the city centre in an effort to gentrify the neighbourhood or something. The obelisks clash very badly with the colourful, busy streets. They strongly resemble a bunch of five-metre-tall tent pegs. They don't do anything except look faintly sinister. There's no plaque or anything suggesting they might have meaning (or an artist) behind them. There's an extremely sharp contrast between the ridiculous black marble things and the beautiful Indigenous art installation outside one of the inner-city galleries. The council's never really lived it down, but they're good for cheap laughs.

I remember somewhere a city did a dedication to 2001: A space odyssey, by placing stone obelisks around the city. Maybe you're referring to that...

Not ''my'' town. Anyway, they don't resemble the Monolith; they're square and leaning, not oblong and perfectly vertical.

IMO, this trope exists for a couple of reasons. One, the art world is so insular that it is impossible to understand certain famous modern art pieces without knowing the specific moment in time they were made, what they were reacting to in the art world, or the then current artistic traditions, especially as the art world is (again) purporting that there is no longer anything original, and that all art is a reaction or recreation of something. Two, people outside of the art world have been given a very, very specific idea of what art is, focusing generally on aesthetic beauty and technique, which usually begins and ends with the Mona Lisa, a painting that very few of them will ever actually experience and is around 600 years old. This is further compounded by the fact that the art world is incredibly resistant to giving any kind of context for the art that they choose to laud, making it impossible for someone who wanders into MOMA to begin to understand the work they'll see there, or even have the kind of skill set that the art world and critics have arbitrarily created to sift the bullshit from the actual talent. In short, it's like a walking into a theater expecting Inception and getting Window Water Baby Moving. It's all art, but one is way less accessible due to a whole lot of critic nonsense and also a lack of availability for those who don't go out of their way to see the kind of work that the latter represents. For those of us, like me, that really appreciate modern and avant garde work, it's pretty easily summed up by my film professor's Universal Studios mug - his parents gave it to him when he was in film school, and it is the perfect representation of the difference between what they thought he was doing and what he was actually doing.

This troper once found half a slightly mouldy cabbage in the pantry and decided that it is now a work of art called ''Life, Death and Cabbage''. Nobody else seemed convinced.

This troper once had an obsession with postmodern literature, including Thomas Pynchon in particular. It was during this phase that I took a class in creative writing, in the hope that the class would push me to exercise my untested writing capabilities. Did it ever. Most of the stories and plays that I wrote were done in a frantic rush to keep up with deadlines. The consequence was that they had little plot and a lot of hasty metafictional twists and abstract dialogues bound by a high-concept philosophy of which I had a semi-knowledge of their meaning. In the end, I received an award for having the highest marks in that class.

This troper believes that this trope is the reason why he keeps getting satisfactory grades for his (terribly-made) art projects.

Lucky for me, my school's art classes generally avoid this trope: my painting teacher explictly told students NOT to do incomprehensible art for a project, and to try and draw people and objects realistically. Also, I have a weird inversion from my Sophomore English class, where we frequently did artsy stuff: For a project we were given a list of words and had to write a poem using the words. I wrote a poem about sentient inanimate objects talking about existence and dreams where pretty much every line is a meaningless WordSalad: my teacher actually compared it to Lewis Carroll's 'The Jabberwocky'. However, because of my reputation as a 'weird kid', no one asked me if it meant anything or if it represented anything. And, if I can gloat for a minute, my silly surreal poem actually was better than most of the realistic poems. That said, I'm a big fan of surrealism, Dada, performance art, and SOME pieces of modern art, but I don't like it because of how 'meaningful' it is and I hate when people make it to be 'meaningful'. I just like it 'cause it's weird and awesome.

Most of this troper and his friend's art. Of course, not all of my friends agree with me.

This troper went to a few modern art museum, including California's LACMA contemporary art museum. Some of the exhibits were pretty awesome (seriously who doesn't think a dead shark suspended in a giant container of formaldehyde isn't cool? http://iowasthinking.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/how-lady-gaga-explains-contemporary-art-pt-1-of-2/), and thoughtful (a giant display of trash an artist's compulsive hoarding mother never threw away during the Chinese Revolution when basic necessities were scarce http://trendland.net/2009/07/15/waste-not-art-installation-by-song-dong/ - though {{YMMV). On the other hand the bunch of large Kellog's cereal boxes stacked on top of each other http://mercurypress.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Broad-Contemporary-Art-Museum-at-LACMA/G0000tJoDBg4FYnY/I0000dCjKj8DYHVs, three basketballs floating in an aquarium http://mercurypress.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Broad-Contemporary-Art-Museum-at-LACMA/G0000tJoDBg4FYnY/I0000MMyAv4ESaoo, and a floaty wedged between a medal ladder http://mercurypress.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Broad-Contemporary-Art-Museum-at-LACMA/G0000tJoDBg4FYnY/I00000kygiSDyqps was just plain lazy

I... have a lemon ice pop... in a bobby's hat.

I will use you to burn down Life's house.

I am the one they call Agent Yellow, guess why.

You can knock out water-borne monsters born from toxins dumped into rivers?