The article does a wonderful job of highlighting what I see to be critical problems in art - does the artist's intention matter, and does any connection to the world outside of the art and its process matter?

I have to confess that I can't stand Jackson Pollock. Sure, as the article says, it takes a certain sensibility and understanding of "the issues" to step back and stop painting. Still, when the painting is about the process of painting, or about some technical issue like texture, or perspective, or balance, in my mind it becomes a technical study. True art, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, is the process of depicting pity and terror. OK, other emotions are allowed in there too, but to me a work of art without connection to the real human world of facts and feelings is a sterile thing without real meaning. That's why my appreciation of non-representational art stops right around Kandinsky. Mondrian is right out. Pollock... ugh!

Some people, in other fields of endeavor, create great art without meaning to. Look at Tolstoy's writing. All of the stuff he intends as expressions of his grand philosophical ideas (in Anna Karenina, everything about Levin and Kitty, for example) is dull and almost impossible to read, whereas his portrayal of people and their real struggles and feelings (Anna and Vronsky) is powerful and moving and feels real.

I see a parallel to this in the work I'm doing. I am researching various ways of imaging blood flow in the brain after a stroke. Some of the work is purely technical in nature - is this mathematical method or another one better for calculating some perfusion parameter, for example. Sure, it's an important question, but it's meaningless unless we prove that such a measurement has real clinical value, that it can predict whether a bit of brain is going to live or die.

Most art that's about the process of creating art seems like this to me... a form of intellectual masturbation that might be fun for the person doing it, but is otherwise devoid of real significance. The difference is that in science purely technical stuff is usually recognized as such, and unless it crosses boundaries into real significance (as it does, occasionally), does not get much hoopla about it. In art, it seems, anything goes.

I have wonderful friends who will vehemently disagree and call me a philistine for such an opinion, but there it is.

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p.s. There is a nice essay by Paul Graham about whether art can be objectively good: <link>