When I think of art, I mainly think of painting. Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, da Vinci, Rembrandt – you get the idea. I might also think of sculpture, like Rodin or Michelangelo. Even buildings themselves, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum or the Notre Dame de Paris, come to mind. Then there are also the performing arts – theater, music, film. Nowadays, it is diplomatic to say “all art forms are equally beautiful,” even though few of us actually believe it. Deep down, however insensitive it may be, we all know that some art forms are shittier than others. I am writing this article to resolve once and for all which art form is the shittiest.

Every art form has its failures. Being a lover of the arts, I have seen many artworks that are flat-out shitty. I have seen a regular twin-sized bed trying to pass as a piece of art in the Museum of Modern Art. In another museum, I saw a ceramic toilet placed on top of a pedestal. But there is one entire genre of art that takes the cake for shittiness: modern dance.

I’m sure we can all agree that dance in general can be quite pleasing. And it has continued to be appreciated, traditional dance in its many different forms has survived around the world for thousands of years. Modern dance, however, is a completely different story.

First, let me explain what I mean by modern dance. I am talking about the movement that originated in the early 20th century as a rebellion against the rigidity of classical ballet. This led to other “movements” (they’re all the same to me) in dance – expressionist dance, free dance, postmodern dance, and dance improvisation. Though the aims of many of these rebellions have been commendable, the result has been universally shitty.

I’ll try to provide some sort of idea as to what modern dance actually looks like. Generally, someone performing a modern dance looks like he’s on some sort of hallucinogen. From what I’ve seen, to successfully pull off a modern dance, all you have to do is claw at the air like a cat a few times, prance around the stage flailing around your arms, make sudden changes in direction, and fall on the ground periodically. “Make random movements,” the progenitors of modern dance must have said, “the more random the better! And, oh yeah, always keep a bewildered look on your face, like a deer in headlights.”

I am sure if you were to study the history of modern dance you might perhaps somehow elicit a shred of meaning from it. But that doesn’t make it any less shitty. An art form is not at all successful if you have to study it extensively to appreciate it. Any art should find the balance between how much the art form must tailor itself to one’s aesthetic sense, and how much one must tailor his aesthetic sense to the art. Very few people are willing to make the effort to forcibly and completely overhaul their taste to appreciate something that they would otherwise scorn. If any art form ignores that fact, then it is bound to fail and die out (take, for example, the short-lived architectural movement of Brutalism). This is why, unless the modern dance movement evolves into something easier to appreciate, it will soon become an antiquity.

That brings us to a deeper question: is modern dance really even art? Is our definition of art too broad? Dance itself is one of the oldest forms of indirect human expression, dating back into prehistoric times. Therefore, it has firmly established itself as one of the most basic art forms in societies across the world. And as bad as modern dance is, it still is undeniably some form of dance. So I would contend that yes, modern dance is art, but it holds the distinction of being the shittiest form of art there is today. And next to a twin-sized bed and a ceramic toilet, that’s saying a lot.