A lot of modern art is not about creating something new but about some "idea" that the artist verbalizes and adds to the artwork as an explanation of why it is "Art".

They have an Autumnal Vernissage every year in Oslo to show what is "new and relevant" and one year they had some art student whose artwork was an IKEA Kitchen and plastic cups filled with GHB.

Another artist's work in another show was to blow up and make collages of photographs from illegal pedophile porn magazines (showing the undisguised faces of real victims of child molestation, without their consent). And yet a third artist paints using the mummified hand of a cadaver as a paintbrush.

It's gone so far that one of the lead representational painters from Norway, Odd Nerdrum, refuses to call himself an "artist" and refers to himself as a "kitsch-painter".

Of course, these may be only aberrations, or extreme examples, but to me they seem like empty gimmicks.

Yes -- both of them.

"Christina's World" was one of my Dad's favorite paintings, and he was quite shattered when he saw a portrait Wyeth had done of Christina Olsen from the front. Not an attractive woman! (She also had polio, so let's be kind!)

Today, after posting the picture above, I was reading up on the painting, online, and learned that only Christina's withered arms and her pink dress are actually hers. The considerably healthier torso and head of hair are actually Wyeth's wife-to-be, who was in her 20s at the time, compared to Christina's 50s.

These damn artists! Buncha damn liars, I tells ya!!!