okay, I don't even fucking like modern art that much, but you're just plain wrong here. you don't know how much you don't know.
trying to capture a painting through photography is kind of a fools' errand. especially a huge painting like Who's Afraid Of Red, Yellow, and Blue. The things that make a painting like this impressive just do not photograph well. Furthermore, the things that made this particular painting impressive are impossible to see without seeing it in real life. (which, tragically, is no longer possible. fuck art vandals.)
let me give you an example with a more accessible painting. Let's look at Van Gogh's Wheat Field With Crows, one of his final paintings. It's widely considered to be a masterpiece.
Here's Wikipedia's png/svg image of it:
looks kinda flat, right? kinda meh? not particularly impressive? but look at this close-up image:
you see how the brushstrokes build on each other? how every stroke gives the painting more texture, almost like a wafer-thin sculpture?
now imagine the entire thing with a subtle glow, a shimmer that moves as you walk past the painting, capturing the light of a wheat field with scattering crows right before a storm. because of the way paint works, most paintings have a subtle shimmer to them. oil paintings have more of a shimmer, because they're varnished. acrylics, like Who's Afraid, have less, but it's still there. and that shimmer is impossible to photograph without making the image itself illegible. it just looks like glare.
and this is true of every painting. any photo you see of a painting is the flattest, deadest possible version of that painting. you can't see the way the artist pushed the paint to give it texture. you can't see the shimmer. you can't see the light reflected on the ground beneath. you can't move around and get a look at the different angles, or feel dwarfed by the immensity of a canvas that's two feet taller than you that just screams RED.
from what little I understand, the Who's Afraid paintings are mostly an exercise in technique. the entire point was getting the paint to have as smooth of a texture as possible.
which, uh, have you worked with acrylics? i have. let me tell you, acrylic paint wants to look like chicken scratch. getting it to look smooth is real fuckin' hard. painting over it? fucks with the texture. varnishing it? fucks with the texture bad, and makes it look oily and glowy in a way it wasn't supposed to. it takes that subtle sheen and makes it look slick.
what happened to this painting is the equivalent of someone putting 80s blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick on the Mona Lisa. you can't get it off. you can't reverse it. the painting is destroyed, whether you like it or not.
the level of proud ignorance and anti-intellectualism you are showing here is, uh. it's on par with a made up guy saying "why are there so many different programming languages? can't you just write everything in assembly? that seems like it'd be easier." it's honestly kinda sickening.
like I said- I don't even like most modern art, it really doesn't do it for me. but you don't have to be an art snob to know why this is a bad thing, or to care about it.
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