Some people look at a painting of a big red dot and see all kinds of meanings in it; I'm afraid I would see 'a big ol' red dot' and nothing more.
I know what you mean. It has to be a really good, big ol' red dot, for me to really like.
The last time I visited the Louvre I marvelled at all the folks elbowing each other out of the way to look at La Gioconda behind all its security. They were not looking at a piece of art. It was something else. As I pondered this, I notice that I was standing by myself in another room in the museum with my back to a smallish painting. I looked at it and it was a Vermeer. Now that was art. Being ignored by the plebes (consider ye whom?). But seriously, I never understood why folks genuinely liked Rothkos and Pollacks until I saw them up close and personal rather than in small pictures in some Time-Life series of art books. There was something there that I really liked, and in the end that's all that matters. It wasn't representational or maudlin, but it was art.
I think that art is a contract between the artist and her/his audience. The artist chooses something to show us, and we enjoy it or we don't. But like most tastes, it's hard to share this feeling that a work of art causes us to have. A lot of people complain about difficult works of art, say a film, and how they just want to be entertained. Well, I was entertained not by one piece of moderate genre art (i.e., the Mona Lisa), but rather by the crowds fighting over a glimpse of it. Does "meaning" in art mean a paratext that explains the art? Or is the emotional state it evokes in the viewer?
I think one of the gravest sins that modern academics have done in the eyes of J Q Public is to attempt to come to terms with popular art / culture using the same apparatus they developed for critiquing "serious" art.
