I've been browsing through the book, "Why A Painting Is Like A Pizza" by Nancy G. Heller and thought I would share some of the thoughts on this. Nancy says that, "both depend on visual balance for much of their overall appeal and, though both can be judged by established standards, pizzas and paintings must ultimately be evaluated in terms of individual taste." I believe this to be true. While my personal individual taste for pizza is cheese, just plain cheese, my individual taste for painting takes on a much boarder range.
In chapter 4, Paintings that people love to hate, she talks about comments that people make like Marcel Nicolle, a french journalist, and his response to a group of radical new paintings. He says, "What we see here has nothing to do with painting. Formless streaks of blue, red, yellow and green, all mixed up, splashes of raw color juxtaposed without rhyme or reason..." Sounds to me like he just likes the cheese pizza of the art world. She goes on in this chapter to talk about artists such as Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Yves Klein and the creative and talented way they portray art.
If you're looking to broaden your horizons in the modern and abstract art world than this might be the book for you. Then again I can't be certain of that as I only skimmed through it.
