Hating modern art is an American civic ritual with a paper trail. When the Armory Show brought avant-garde European painting to New York in 1913, Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" was mobbed, mocked in cartoons, and nicknamed everything from "an explosion in a shingle factory" to "an earthquake in a shingle mill" by the press of the day. More than a century later, the jokes have not improved and the ritual has not stopped. The hostility is not a misunderstanding of modern art. It is a stable relationship with it.
How old is the mockery?
Older than the art itself, by American standards. The 1913 Armory Show drew about 75,000 visitors in New York and then toured to Chicago and Boston, drawing crowds partly to jeer; former President Theodore Roosevelt's review declared the Cubists welcome only because they made him appreciate ordinary representational work more. Chicago art students burned Matisse in effigy. The pattern repeated with each arrival: Jackson Pollock was profiled in Life magazine in 1949 under the headline asking if he was "the greatest living painter in the United States" — a question constructed to be answered no. When the Whitney acquired Pollocks and the Museum of Modern Art canonized abstraction, popular magazines ran drip-painting jokes for a decade.
The hostility consolidated into an institution of its own: the American tradition of treating the blank-looking canvas as evidence of a con. "My kid could paint that" entered the language sometime mid-century and never left, functioning as the vernacular version of a philosophical objection — that art requires skill the viewer can verify.
Is the mockery actually about the art?
Only partly. Three deeper grievances hide inside the joke. The first is class: modern art reads as an elite dialect, validated in cities, priced in millions, explained by people with graduate degrees, and bought by people with bankers. Hating it is a way of refusing to feel linguistically excluded from a room. The second is money: the 1973 Sotheby's sale of the Scull collection, where works bought cheap from living artists resold for fortunes, established the modern spectacle of art as an asset class, and every subsequent eight-figure headline — including the $450 million Salvator Mundi sale in 2017 — confirmed the suspicion that the market, not the work, is the point. The third is trust: a banana taped to a wall, sold for $120,000 in 2019 and then eaten by a performance artist, strikes the skeptic as a system announcing that it cannot be parodied — which, naturally, makes parody irresistible.
Note what all three share: none requires looking at paintings. The American anti-modernist tradition is unusually durable precisely because its target is the art world's structure — admission, explanation, price — rather than any particular canvas. The canvas is just where the bill is presented.
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What do the critics of the critics say?
The defenders' case deserves a straight telling, because parts of it are simply true. First, difficulty is not fraud: the modern tradition, from Kandinsky to Pollock to Rothko, had coherent aims — the expression of inner states, the exploration of paint itself, the search for a spiritual seriousness that photography had made representation unable to carry — and much of it rewards exactly the sustained attention skeptics decline to give. Second, the mockery often aims at a straw man: the vast majority of modern and contemporary art is neither priced in millions nor wall-of-text-obscure, and museum attendance figures — the Museum of Modern Art alone draws millions of visitors a year — suggest Americans dislike modern art in roughly the way they dislike Congress, while still visiting it. Third, the "my kid could paint that" test fails empirically: studies have repeatedly shown that people can distinguish abstract masters from children's and animals' work at better-than-chance rates.
And the objection from skill has an awkward history. The same argument was made against Impressionism in the 1870s, against Whistler — who won a farthing in his 1878 libel suit over it — and against nearly every painter now hanging comfortably in the museums the skeptics prefer. "Unmade Bed" arguments age badly; the American canon keeps absorbing its villains.
Why does America specifically keep running this argument?
Because the country's founding cultural premises collide with modern art's premises. American common-sense realism — art should show skill, represent honestly, and be accessible to any citizen — descends from the same democratic suspicion that animated the Revolution. Modern art asserts the opposite: that representation is exhausted, that skill is a category of the past, that meaning may require explanation, and that a small trained audience may legitimately lead taste. The fight is therefore a real one, a collision of two sincere theories of culture: the democratic and the avant-garde. It cannot be settled, which is why it never is.
There is also an honest commercial dimension that keeps the quarrel fed. Museums discovered decades ago that controversy sells: the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 drew enormous crowds partly because a mayor tried to close it. An art world that benefits from attention and a public that enjoys outrage have a mutually beneficial arrangement. The banana is not a failure of the system. The banana is the system working.
Will the hating ever stop?
Not on current evidence — but it migrates. Each generation's version of the joke requires the art to still feel official. Abstract expressionism was the enemy of the 1950s; minimalism and conceptualism took over in the 1960s and 1970s; the 1990s fought over identity and public funding, with the NEA controversies that permanently scarred arts politics; the 2010s and 2020s quarrel over NFTs, market spectacles, and AI-generated work — the newest legitimate target for the oldest American suspicion. Meanwhile the older villains mellow into attractions: Pollock's drip paintings, once the punchline, now anchor museum blockbuster shows that the grandchildren of his mockers stand in line for. The hatred, it turns out, is how America digests its art — loudly, in public, one straw man at a time, until the next shipment of official difficulty arrives to be disliked on principle.