Clive - there's a difference between appreciating an image (a perfectly worthwhile pursuit in itself) and being able to articulate WHY that image is brilliant, what it means not only in isolation but in context. If you had previously only seen Italian Renaissance paintings, and then had a Van Gogh plopped in front of you, you'd probably have a similar reaction to it that many of his contemporaries had... "WTF?!?!?!" in today's vernacular. You wouldn't see it as brilliant, in all likelihood - you'd see it as crap finger-painted by a lunatic. Today, we see Van Gogh as a visionary who completely changed the game. But why did he do what he did? Why is what he did so revolutionary? What about Monet? His water lilies are also game-changing paintings, but to understand them you need to know that Monet was painting with a very specific agenda - he was trying to replicate on canvas exactly what he saw through his cataract-laden myopic eyes. There's his theory - his art was all about painting the world as he visually perceived it rather than how it was supposed to appear, or how others saw it. You can certainly get into an argument about the metaphoric meaning of that act, but we're not here to argue about Monet or Van Gogh specifically.