Rules of abstraction

I have been to the Matisse exhibition in Tate last weekend and there was this program called 'rules of abstraction' last night on bbc4 that talked about Kazimir Malevich and his contemporaries.

Two observations;

First of all, the lack of craft in abstract art is really bothering me. I appreciate that art is mostly feeling and simple doesn't mean not good. A Stones song can be much more mood lifting then Wagner, although technically simpler. Also some of the Matisse stuff was very good indeed. But this?


"Malevich.black-square" by Kazimir Malevich - Unknown. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Secondly, I love the way we "fill in the gaps" with extraordinary nonsense, like

"..the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth."

You can't just say "this is a black rectangle" can you?

We have similar stuff in software world. For example you cannot just say;

Spring, a framework that calls your constructors that you have put in an xml file.
(Or more recently; 'untyped, text based, runtime linking of your application' - such that you discover possible composition problems in production)

You need to come up with something like;

"... a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform."

Hah.