The problem in a word: that there are some celebrated ‘artists’ out there who are not creating ‘art’ at all, but instead dishing up stuff which is altogether less appealing.

For a start, which part of all the clutter is the art?

Today the art industry slogan 'eye of the beholder' determines the quality of produced works.

It is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the beholder realizes - the way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path. But, there are moments in life when we must say no even to closed ones, regardless of hard feelings; otherwise, we may suffer too much following them in the wrong way. So why is modern art so bad?

Questions like this explain why contemporary art is afflicted by a pervading sense of uncertainty, combined with the genuine possibility that audiences – enthusiastic or not – are being sold well short. I am not talking about people condemning artwork because they don’t like it, but rather about a lurking suspicion that

It’s all form and no story, content, vision, originality, concept, etc. And beyond the voluminous interpretive chatter, none of it has any convincing depth. So this is also about confronting the idea that no one can tell the real difference, in artistic terms, between outright nonsense and pure gold, or maybe no one is trying as art connoisseurs evidently shall not drag themselves in discussing occasional urinals on display, beer cans installations or tanked sharks.

I presume we shall identify and clarify the precise nature of art so that we can make objective assessments about what we are presented with. And along the way, we need to acknowledge the misgivings that many people might have concerning the ultimate merit of contemporary artworks, as well as the possibility that the persisting disquiet might turn out to be very well-founded.

All the major modern artists – from Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys to Jeff Koons – are mostly no extra-terrestrial, but this saturates their artworks with an acceptable cogency leaning towards design rather than art. While design and art do share many overlapping qualities, they are two fundamentally different disciplines. Damian Hirst has been trying hard for years to be both singular and mysterious, but so far to no avail. He wants to inhabit the domain of artistic otherness, but he can’t quite find a way to do it. There is also no point denying the skillful way these artists worked the system to their advantage. But when it comes to them being authentic ‘artists,’ we’re going to go to an entirely different conclusion.

The point is that the essence of real art is not about repetition, or obsession, or indecency, or sensationalism:

Art is a special mystery unto itself.