The point of these more abstract art movements was that people have already seen skillful and masterful works that perfectly recreate the human figure and world lets try to create beauty and meaning in non traditional ways
Nah, things like duchamp's "fountain" and jackson pollock's dripping painting are explicitly a rejection of beauty as a value.
They're also a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. This is an old scheme that needs three people; the expert, the artist and the philantropist.
Artist turns everyday items into something very expensive. Expert affirms the price and essentially markets. Philantropist buys it for a quarter of a million (but not nearly that much money actually changes hands). Philantropist donates it to public buildings.
The recipients are glad that they get such an expensive work and they can verify the value with the expert, though they have little incentive to prove that their possession has low value.
The philantropist now has a huge tax deduction.
This scheme has become much easier, now that artists can produce shit quality, because their productivity went up 1000x since abstract and ugly are both seen as virtues. And since people in general have become fooled, artists these days aren't in on the scheme anymore. Instead they're literal drooling re tar ds, and the philantropist gets a new one all the time and they purchase a lot of works before the price is inflated by one of their art dealers, and they donate works after the price inflation.
It helps that making ugly abstract art is the status quo that art schools are educating people into.
