(Image by Yves Lorson, at flickr.com)

As many recent readers’ comments indicate, a lot of reasonable, smart people —including some artists — have nothing but contempt for contemporary art. A few even suspect contemporary artists — in particular, the famous ones whose moves from one mega-dealer to another are always in the art news, and whose exhibitions greedily gobble up whole museum interiors with gosh-and-golly “installations” — of pulling a fast one on the public.

Even people with broad taste in art, who like everything in modernism from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, become enraged when they see so much contemporary art that to them looks deliberately ugly, or calculatedly offensive, or outrageously oversized or overproduced, or ridiculously expensive, or deliberately slack. The chorus of protest veritably shouts, “Why can’t contemporary artists just make beautiful art — like artists used to do?”

It’s important not to blame artists for changes in social and cultural values. Yes, they play a role in cultural changes, but they are not the single or even most important cause of those changes. Artists necessarily make art that mirrors their own times. (Otherwise, they’d be ignored — something artists emphatically do not like.) In modern times, some artists have been notoriously ahead of their times — but these artists are exceptions to the general rule, operative even in modernism, that artists who want to be significant in the history of art must, for starters, be recognized in their own times.

We can’t predict how people in the future will interpret art that’s made in any given era, or the new contexts in which it will be seen. The Greeks, for example, would have found our delectation over the armless Venus de Milo incomprehensible. People in the Renaissance would have thought it absurd to find beauty in Gothic ruins, and a museum-going bourgeois in Paris in the 1870s regarded Impressionism as hideously ugly.

If modern art has taught us one thing, it is to be appreciative of many different kinds of art. Picasso thought African sculpture was truly beautiful when most people thought it only exotic. The art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler thought Picasso’s African-influenced Cubist paintings beautiful when most people thought them ugly. Many current historians of modern art find Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn” paintings truly beautiful, where their predecessors found them merely crassly attention-getting. And so on.

Today’s most visible contemporary art reflects and compresses our society’s main beliefs into visual forms. Like it or not, the odds are that the art from today that’s thought to be great (or even just very good) a hundred years from now, is right now among the art that’s being shown in galleries. To invoke the old saw about fiction, “There are no Great American Novels lying in bureau drawers.” With the exception of “outsider artists” — the rare exception, since there are hardly any possibilities left for anyone to truly be “outside” society — visual artists aren’t like Emily Dickinson, quietly stowing their art away in a private place.

Whether we’re talking about Michelangelo with his celestial nudes, Monet with his “impression” of a sunrise, or the contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami with his bug-eyed, flower wallpaper, the first aim of an artist is to express some kind of meaning. For many artists, meaning comes through beauty. But not for all. Just about any expressionist artist — from Matthias Grünewald in the 16th century to Emile Nolde in the early 20th — aims first and foremost to express deep agony, and he (or, these days, she) uses deep distortion, rather than beauty, to achieve that aim. Seeing the paintings of Chaim Soutine or Francis Bacon or Alice Neel as “beautiful” is a retrospective, culturally acquired, taste.

Then there’s the vast and varied category of “conceptual art,” ranging from Marcel Duchamp and Dada from 90 years ago, through Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth a generation ago, to every third show in the Chelsea galleries today. It all goes for ironic meaning — a punch line, if you will — at the expense of not only beauty, but even any design considerations other than basic legibility.

But, one suspects, even if Duchamp had never been born and Dada had never occurred, our egalitarian age would still devalue beauty. We who live in this speedy, diverse, more or less democratic society are, down deep, fairly suspicious of beauty. Beauty is based on a hierarchy that labels some things undeniably “beautiful” and others irretrievably ugly. Most serious, inventive and “alive” contemporary artists don’t want merely to reiterate elements of an established hierarchy. Even if they are interested in “beauty,” they want to test its boundaries, to make it new, to make it a beauty that speaks to their times. This is the task for artists of our times. Blaming contemporary artists for the situation caused by the democratic age in which we live is, in the end, a little silly.

When the next generation of artists looks back at the art being made today, it will probably dismiss most of it not as ugly, or too ironic, but as merely old-fashioned, i.e. not “beautiful” in a meaningful way to them or, with our current “conceptual” art, not ironic enough. Sometime in the future, however, some overlooked aspect of some of today’s art will inevitably stimulate new and unexpected beauties. “Beautiful,” that is, to people energetic enough to get out there and look at contemporary art, open-minded enough really to wrestle with it, and savvy enough to try to sort things out for themselves.

This, folks, is the way the art ball bounces.