Is This Art? The Problem With Saying “I Could Do That”
- George Tatakis
- 1 day ago
- 12 min read
Someone walks into a museum, sees a Rothko, a Pollock, a white canvas, a black square, a banana taped to a wall, or some installation that looks like someone forgot to finish the room, and says the most predictable thing in the world.
“I could do that.”
Sometimes it comes in another form.
“My child could do that.”
“What does this even mean?”
“Why is this valuable?”
“This is rubbish.”
And to be fair, I understand the reaction. I really do. There is a lot of rubbish in art. There is a lot of pretension. There are artists hiding behind words because the work itself has nothing to say. There are collectors buying names rather than looking. There are institutions pretending to understand things because everyone else in the room is also pretending.
So, the public is not always wrong.
But the phrase “I could do that” is still almost always the wrong starting point.
Because the question is not whether you could physically repeat the action. The question is whether you could arrive there with necessity.
That is the part most people miss.
A child can draw a line. A drunk man can drip paint. A decorator can place two colours next to each other. A printer can make a perfect reproduction. None of this is the same as making art.
Art is not the visible difficulty of the gesture. Art is the necessity behind the gesture.
And this is where the whole debate around abstract art, modern art and contemporary art becomes more interesting than people think.
Difficulty Is Not the Same as Value
We have been trained to confuse difficulty with value.
If someone paints a face that looks exactly like a photograph, people immediately say, “amazing”. If someone carves marble until it looks like flesh, everyone understands the skill. If someone paints a horse and the horse looks like a horse, nobody has to explain anything.
The skill is visible.
But visible skill is only one kind of artistic value.
A very difficult painting can be completely dead. A technically perfect image can say nothing. A photograph can be sharp, correctly exposed, beautifully printed and still be empty. I see this constantly in photography. The camera has made technique available to almost everyone, but it has not made vision available to everyone.
This is why the “I could do that” argument collapses so quickly.
It assumes that art is a performance of difficulty. It assumes that the more difficult something looks, the more artistic it is. But art does not work like sport. It is not always the person who jumps the highest who wins.
Sometimes the strongest gesture is the simplest one.
A black square. A blurred field of red. A violent web of paint. A silent face. An empty room. A woman standing in a doorway. A single figure against a white wall.
The question is not: was this hard to execute?
The better question is: did this have to exist in this form?
That is much harder to answer.
The Public Is Right to Be Suspicious
I do not want to defend everything just because it is called art.
This is where many articles on abstract art become useless. They immediately treat the viewer as stupid. They say, “you just don’t understand”. That is lazy.
The viewer often understands more than the art world wants to admit. The viewer senses when something is hollow. The viewer senses when the label is doing more work than the object. The viewer senses when the work is not mysterious, but simply weak.
This is especially true in contemporary art.
There are works where the idea is interesting, but the object is dead. There are works where the explanation is better than the work. There are works where the artist is not making art but performing intelligence. There are works where “concept” becomes a luxury currency, understood only by the people who already belong to the room.
So yes, there is bad abstract art. There is bad modern art. There is bad contemporary art. There is bad figurative art, too.
The mistake is not criticism.
The mistake is using bad art as proof that the entire language is false.
That would be like seeing a terrible portrait photograph and deciding that photography is not art.
What Abstract Art Removes
Abstract art removes the thing most people rely on.
Recognition.
When you look at a traditional painting, you can say, “this is a woman,” “this is a landscape,” “this is a battle,” “this is a saint,” “this is a village,” “this is a table with fruit.” Even if you do not understand the deeper meaning, you have somewhere to begin.
Abstract art takes that away.
It does not give you a face. It does not give you a story. It does not give you a village, a costume, a mountain, a body, a religious scene or a historical event. It gives you colour, line, rhythm, scale, surface, silence, repetition, tension, balance, weight.
And suddenly the viewer feels abandoned.
This is why abstract art can feel insulting. It refuses to translate itself immediately. It asks you to look without the comfort of recognition.
That does not mean it has no meaning.
It means the meaning is not delivered through subject matter.
In photography, I work with real people, real places, real traditions. So I am not an abstract artist. But even in my work, the subject is never enough. A traditional costume is not automatically a photograph. A beautiful village is not automatically a photograph. A face is not automatically a portrait.
The photograph begins when the visible thing becomes form.
Geometry. Light. Hierarchy. Gesture. Stillness. Distance. Pressure. The invisible arrangement that makes the image hold together.
This is what abstract art exposes directly. It removes the excuse of subject and leaves you with the skeleton of visual experience.
“But What Does It Mean?”
This is another question people ask in front of abstract art.
“What does it mean?”
It is a fair question, but often it is asked in the wrong way.
People expect meaning to behave like a riddle. There is a painting, and behind it is a hidden message. If you know the message, you “get it”. If you do not know it, you are outside the joke.
But not all art works like that.
Some art is not a message. Some art is an experience.
A Rothko does not need to mean “sadness” or “faith” or “death” in the way a road sign means “stop”. It may produce a state. It may slow you down. It may make colour feel heavy. It may make silence visible. It may put you in front of something that feels larger than language.
That is not the absence of meaning.
That is a different type of meaning.
Music works like this all the time. Nobody listens to a piece of instrumental music and says, “yes, but what does this violin mean?” You allow the form to work on you. You accept rhythm, tone, repetition and silence as carriers of meaning.
Visual art can do the same.
The problem is that with painting, people often demand an explanation they would never demand from music.
Rothko and the Problem of Silence
Mark Rothko is useful because he looks so easy to dismiss.
A few floating rectangles. Large fields of colour. Blurred edges. No figures. No story. No obvious skill in the classical sense.
And yet, stand in front of a good Rothko in person and something strange can happen. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough to matter.
The scale changes the experience. The painting is not an image you inspect from a safe distance. It becomes an environment. Rothko wanted viewers to stand close, around eighteen inches away, so that the painting would not sit politely on the wall but surround the body. The large format was not about showing off. It was about intimacy. He wanted the viewer to feel inside the painting rather than outside it.
That is very important.
Because on a phone screen, Rothko is almost nothing. A JPEG of a Rothko is a joke. It becomes two blocks of colour. But the painting was never made to be understood as a thumbnail. It was made for the body.
This is one reason people misunderstand art online. Scale disappears. Surface disappears. Time disappears. The slow encounter disappears.
Rothko’s mature works came after years of searching. They were not an overnight trick. He moved through figuration, myth, symbolism and surrealist influence before arriving at the colour fields. The simplicity was not the beginning. It was the residue of a long reduction.
That is the difference between simplicity and emptiness.
Simplicity is what remains after you remove everything unnecessary.
Emptiness is what remains when there was nothing there in the first place.
Pollock and the Problem of Control
Jackson Pollock is the other obvious target.
Drips. Splashes. Paint thrown around. The famous joke is that anyone can spill paint.
Yes, anyone can spill paint.
But Pollock was not simply spilling paint. He changed the position of the canvas, placing it on the floor so he could move around it from all sides. The painting became an arena, not a window. The body entered the work. Gesture, rhythm, gravity, speed and accident became part of the image.
This is why Pollock matters.
Not because every drip is sacred. Not because every painting is equally good. But because he changed what a painting could be.
He made the act of painting visible.
The finished work is not just an image. It is a record of movement. It holds time. You can follow the layers, the arcs, the density, the decisions, the moments where control gives way to accident and accident is brought back into control.
Good Pollock is not chaos. It is ordered chaos.
That phrase sounds like a cliché, but in this case it is accurate. The power comes from the tension between freedom and structure. If it were only random, it would collapse. If it were only controlled, it would become decorative.
The work lives in between.
And again, this is not so different from photography.
A good photograph often looks inevitable. The viewer thinks, “you just pressed the button.” But the photographer knows that the button is the least interesting part. The real work is in seeing the structure before it disappears. In knowing where to stand. In knowing what not to include. In understanding when the geometry becomes alive.
The final gesture may take a fraction of a second.
The preparation may take a lifetime.
Good Abstract Art and Bad Abstract Art
There is a reason many people think abstract art is fake.
Because bad abstract art is everywhere.
You see it in hotels, offices, restaurants, online shops, hobby studios and algorithmic wall art. It imitates the surface of abstraction without the necessity. It has texture, but no tension. Colour, but no hierarchy. Gesture, but no risk. Scale, but no presence.
It is decoration pretending to be art.
There is nothing wrong with decoration. A room needs atmosphere. A wall may need colour. But decoration and art are not the same thing.
Good abstract art has internal pressure.
You feel that something is being held together. The colour is not just attractive, it is doing work. The marks are not just expressive, they are necessary. The empty space is not empty, it has weight. The surface is not random, it has rhythm.
A useful way to judge abstract art is to ask:
Could anything be moved without weakening the work?
If the answer is yes, the work may be loose. If the answer is no, if every relationship feels charged, then you are probably looking at something more serious.
This applies to all art.
In a portrait, if the hand is wrong, the image weakens. In a photograph, if the background line cuts the head, the image weakens. In abstract painting, if the colour, edge, weight or rhythm is wrong, the work weakens.
The grammar is different, but the discipline is still there.
Why the Market Makes People Angry
A lot of the hatred toward modern art is not really about the art.
It is about money.
When someone hears that a Rothko, Pollock or some contemporary artwork sold for tens or hundreds of millions, the reaction is not purely aesthetic. It is moral. People feel insulted. They think, “how can this be worth more than a hospital, a school, a lifetime of work?”
Again, I understand this reaction.
But the art market is not a measure of spiritual truth. It is a market. It is shaped by rarity, provenance, historical importance, museums, collectors, speculation, tax structures, prestige and desire.
The price of a painting does not prove that it is good.
But a high price also does not prove it is bad.
This distinction matters.
Pollock is valuable partly because he changed painting. Rothko is valuable partly because his work became central to the history of abstract expressionism and colour field painting. Their best works are rare, historically important and often held in museums. Collectors are not only buying pigment on canvas. They are buying position inside art history.
You may find that absurd.
But it is not the same question as whether the work has artistic value.
Market value and artistic value overlap sometimes. They also distort each other. We should be intelligent enough to criticise the market without pretending the art itself is meaningless.
The Neuroscience Is Interesting, But It Is Not the Whole Story
There is research suggesting that abstract art frees the brain from the dominance of recognisable reality. Because you are not busy identifying objects, the mind begins to form new emotional and cognitive associations. In simple terms, abstract art gives the brain room to move.
This is useful, but I would be careful not to reduce art to neuroscience.
The brain is involved in everything. That does not mean a brain scan explains a painting.
Still, the research helps explain why abstract art can be rewarding. It does not tell you what to see. It does not close the image. It leaves space for the viewer to participate.
And participation is not a weakness.
It is one of the great powers of art.
This is also why I work in black and white. I remove colour not because colour is bad, but because removal can create participation. The viewer is not given everything. He has to enter the image. He has to complete something.
Abstract art often does this more radically.
It removes the object itself.
Contemporary Art and the Exhaustion of Concept
Now, we need to talk about contemporary art.
Because the “I could do that” argument is no longer only about Rothko and Pollock. It is about a much larger fatigue.
People are tired of being told that anything can be art as long as the explanation is clever enough.
And honestly, they have a point.
Concept alone can become empty. If the work has no form, no presence, no tension, no risk and no necessity, then the concept becomes a receipt. It tells you what you were supposed to buy, but it does not feed you.
This is why the current moment is interesting. We live in a time of AI images, digital overload, content production, trends, prompts, filters and endless visual noise. In such a world, the human gesture becomes valuable again. Process becomes valuable. Authenticity becomes valuable. Not as marketing words, but as evidence that a human being had to make this thing.
Pollock’s body matters again.
Rothko’s silence matters again.
Craft matters, but not as academic display. Concept matters, but not as an excuse. Emotion matters, but not as sentimentality.
The strongest art today will probably be the art that survives all three questions:
Does it have form?
Does it have necessity?
Does it stay with you?
How to Look at Art You Do Not Understand
Here is the simplest method I know.
Do not start by asking whether it is art.
Start by asking what it is doing.
Does it slow you down or push you away? Does it create tension? Does it hold the room? Does it feel dead on the wall, or does it change as you look? Is the scale important? Is the material important? Is the repetition doing something? Is the emptiness active or just empty?
Then ask what choices were made.
Why this size? Why this colour? Why this edge? Why this distance? Why this silence? Why this amount of control? Why this amount of accident?
Then ask whether the work could be otherwise.
If you can change anything and nothing is lost, the work is weak. If changing one thing breaks the structure, then there is probably more there than you first thought.
And finally, ask whether it remains with you.
Not whether you like it immediately. Not whether you would hang it above your sofa. Not whether it matches the room.
Does it remain?
Some works do. Some works don’t.
That is allowed.
You are not obliged to love Rothko. You are not obliged to love Pollock. You are not obliged to pretend that every object in a museum is profound.
But you owe yourself a better question than “I could do that.”
The Real Question
So, is abstract art real art?
Of course it is.
But that does not mean all abstract art is good.
Is modern art valuable?
Sometimes. Not always.
Is contemporary art full of pretension?
Often.
Can a child make something visually powerful?
Absolutely.
Can an amateur accidentally make something interesting?
Yes.
Can a simple gesture carry more weight than a technically difficult one?
Yes, and this is where art becomes dangerous.
Because if we accept that art is not only about visible labour, then we have to look more carefully. We can no longer hide behind the comfort of technique. We have to judge form, intention, presence, history, necessity and effect.
That is harder.
It is much easier to say, “I could do that.”
But could you?
Not could you copy the surface. Could you remove everything unnecessary and still leave something alive? Could you make a work that changes the room? Could you make a gesture so simple that people mistake it for nothing, but it continues to trouble them decades later?
That is the real question.
And for me, that is where art begins.
Not in complexity.
Not in explanation.
Not in price.
Not in the approval of institutions.
But in the moment when a form, however simple, becomes necessary.
That is what people often cannot see.
And that is why they say, “I could do that.”
Love xx
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