Picasso isn't one of my favorites, although he did produce a half dozen or so works that I find "interesting." Most of the rest of the more than 30,000 known Picasso originals leave me a little "underwhelmed." The sheer volume of works smacks strongly of "formula art," which is something to which he frequently and freely admitted.

It is a little hard to see, given the number of works floating around, how one specific one of them should be worth that much. As the advertising industry says, it's largely a matter of "name recognition?"

Having no "education" in Art, I have to rely on my own judgement, based on looking at something like 12,000 pictures on the web in the past couple of years. (It was an "intentional research.) I have come to the conclusion that most recent "art" is the product of dealers and critics, who "push" the "artist" whose work they can get their own hands on, without real regard for any "intrinsic value."

Art "education" has become so "popular" that I don't believe that the universities that "teach about art" can populate their necessary faculties with people who really have much feeling for it. A whole set of "standard lies" has been developed, to make it easy to "teach about" something that few can do. "Those who can, do. Those who can't, criticize?" There seems to be more money in criticism than in creating - especially if you're not a particularly creative person.

John