Many people admire Kazimir Malevich’s painting «Black Square», which from a visual art perspective appears to be unremarkable, but nonetheless it is one of the most recognized works of art. And the price of this painting, which virtually anyone, even a child, can reproduce is a whopping 20 million dollars!
According to Sotheby’s registry, it is currently valued at 20 million dollars. Perhaps it is the only painting that virtually anyone can forge with precision within a few tens of minutes. A black square painted by me or you on a canvas would not be worth anything at all. Paradoxical? YES! No one can really explain it, but in order not to seem clueless, everyone acknowledges the significance of this work. And I too, but only because I have found my own explanation!
«Black Square» is an unconventional and very philosophical work. I consider this painting to be equivalent to the finiteness of art! Without belittling the artistic value of other talented artists’ beautiful works, it can be said that «Black Square», in a philosophical sense, simply put an end to visual art. Why paint a picture of the Isaac Cathedral or the landscapes around it? Or a nude woman? If all of this can simply be photographed.
You cannot draw anything better or more realistically than you can photograph, but you can take a photograph. Thus, new directions in art may be revealed.
So what makes «Black Square» so talented? You can also «write» a white square, and a yellow one, and a red one, and a green one… As well as abstract art — non-standard shapes, a multitude of non-coherent parts, the absurdity of the work itself, bright and seemingly unnecessary contrasting colors… It’s all nonsense, isn’t it? It is impossible to evaluate it in any way. So why is the painting so popular? Why the black square?
One explanation for the painting’s talent is its non-standard approach and, strangely enough, the genius of its simplicity! Despite the primitiveness and complexity of its artistic value, there is no such value in this painting.
I think no one doubts Malevich’s ability to create more understandable works. As an example, here is his self-portrait, painted by himself:

I think it’s not difficult to determine the accuracy of the self-portrait. That is, he definitely knew how to paint (at least portraits)!
Therefore, the meaning of the work «Black Square» is not in reproducing the accuracy of the surrounding world, not its beauty or ugliness, but in a metaphorical journey into something else.
If we look at the «Black Square» from a height (or just from a distance) in today’s era of pixels and megabytes, we will see a DOT, pixel, call it what you will. It is the fundamental component of the entire computer world — the foundation of the computer universe. Two colors — black and white (zero and one). It’s incredible!
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