You have hit on the problem I have modern art, unwittingly, I suppose. For those who love it, it is a pseudo-religion. They have a sort of faith that whatever the object is, vague and disjointed as it often is, it has meaning, deep meaning because its modern. However, would ague that this meaning, this relevance, is imposed on the object by a willing viewer. Vagueness for some equals mystery. Mystery in turn seems profound.
I think that the Emperor's New Clothes analogy doesn't fit modern art any more. There is something more problematic to modern art than fashion. Now, its followers and apologists have all the logic of cult followers, that is, none; they are irrational. (And entirely skeptical of any organized religion.) I equate this to all of those who disparage Western medicine and the scientific method while uncritically supporting alternative treatments and hearsay. If medicine were up to modernists, we'd all be covered in leaches taking and taking arsenic.
For realists, on the other hand, theory and meaning must be based in the object. The object is enjoyed for what it presents, not for what it doesn't. Any suppositions have to be there, in the subject, evinced visually. The art, not theory, is the primary source. It's really the more intellectually honest. A posteriori. Sans idées reçues.
This is why so many are critical of Freud. While there is a certain grandeur to his work in person, one must have to admit that his painting style is crude. His subjects, while sculptural and in this way, artistic, suffer as well from his dispassionate eye. For example, there is nothing in the painting itself, without really stretching the truth, that tells us anything about Ms. Moss: the model, her money, or her life's journey, so to speak. Or, what does Freud think of her? Perhaps he sees here as ugly, but this is a rather simplistic reaction. Instead, we only see Freud's thick paint and anemic coloring. The model is irrelevant.
