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Head over to NYC’s MoMa and you’ll probably hear this — “my kid could paint that!” It’s an ages-old critique of pretty much all art after about 1900, and is especially applied to artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But here’s the point — even if your kid could paint that, did they? No, someone else did, and stuck it in a gallery, and there you have it.

Here are a few more reasons why that just won’t do as art criticism.

#5: Most Modernists Are Expert Draftsmen, Too.

One of the most frequent charges is that the modern artist simply cannot muster the appropriate skill to actually create a classic painting, so they’ve gone off in another direction to mask their inability.

There’s no substance to most of these arguments — if you took a look through the private notebooks of thousands of modernist and contemporary artists, you’ll see their consummate skill. But that’s not really the issue, since there was no way forward from just being “great” at imitating old painters.

#4: Modern Artists Are Consistent.

If you use the typical kid-could-paint-that argument, you’re not really focusing on the fact that your kid might be able to produce a convincing Rothko imitation if he got really lucky, but then he’d move on to drawing a cat that was bigger than a house.

Just look at someone like Barnett Newman — he’s often singled out for criticism, but there’s no way he could have ‘tricked’ the art world over and over without some very smart critics picking up on it. It’s not all just some scam.

#3: Sometimes We Forget That Art is Experience.

I’d be overjoyed if my kid could paint a Pollock. But the whole point of moving past some of the boundaries imposed by the classic method in painting was to start exploring — across all genres of art and culture — what those classic models actually meant.

If you’re not interested in all of that, that’s OK — there are plenty of galleries full of renaissance painting that can make you happy for the rest of your life. But some people are concerned with evolving the standards, established in the 1400s and before, about what real art actually is. Your kid probably isn’t one of these, but many others were.

#2: Artists Aren’t Responsible For The Prices of Their Work.

Most of the time people lose their minds and the more conservative critics emerge when a piece of art is bought with public funds that isn’t a universally agreed-upon masterpiece (basically if it’s not from the Italian renaissance, people will find problems with it).

Especially when a lot of money is paid, newspaper articles tend to get written with tremendous speed. But hey, the artist didn’t set that price, and it’s not his or her fault that the market is willing to pay for that.

#1: Why Compete With Michaelangelo?

Why should anyone bother competing with the Sistine Chapel? When you can throw paint splotches at a canvas until it finally starts making sense, shouldn’t you be doing that, instead of trying to reach a level of renaissance craftsmanship that is best left to its era?

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