Your Thoughts On Art

[Belacqua]

There was a documentary on the BBC last night about the most influential and richest artist in the world right now.
He paints nothing but childlike lines on canvas.
The art critics interviewed kept going on about the meaning of the pieces and how important they were, they were just lines. I mean as lines go they weren't offensive but please.

So art.

Pretentious bullshit.

and @Thoreauvian

A lot of times people tell me that art is entirely a matter of personal preference. What you like and what you don't like is just your choice. 

If that's true, then painting people in a way that isn't portrait-like, or painting childish lines on canvas, isn't something we can really judge. If a person likes it, we just accept that they like it. 

Here I think you are tending to a different view: that it is a mistake for an artist to paint people in a way you disapprove of, or to paint childish lines. Or perhaps we could say it's OK to do it if they keep it to themselves and don't try to claim that it's worthwhile for other people to look at. But since such works are clearly misguided, any explanation made for them can be called "rationalizations." 

This indicates to me that there are some standards you are applying. If we say that John Singer Sargent's paintings of people are approached in the proper way because they are more portrait-like, and Cèzanne's aren't, this seems to imply the presence of something more than personal taste. A way people ought to paint.

If one person says "these childish lines are exactly what painting ought to be in our age, for X, Y, and Z reasons," is this something we can argue against and use reasons to show that he is wrong? 

This appears to me to claim that art is very much NOT a matter of personal taste, but is involved in the shoulds and oughts of the world. 

Are there articulable rules we can come up with for how paintings ought to be? Or at least for which paintings are good to show in public? 

I'd be curious what those rules are, and how far they reach. Are they in some way moral rules?