For example, Blue Monochrome [1] seems to my uneducated eye to be just a layer of pure blue that every wall painter recreates every time they paint a wall blue. Why is the Blue Monochrome piece more than just a wall painted blue?
There are a few flowers that have this property; fuscias, and others with strong UV fluorescence.
Chemistry has DRASTICALLY altered painting from the Renaissance to the World War era. New pigments have been constantly highlighted and displayed in artwork. Finally, an insanely blue blue has been invented, bluer than any other blue paint in the past.
The artist highlighted above attempts to showcase the new technology in its purest form. Though, despite this strive for purity of blue, the application is inherently uneven. If you look into the painted canvas up close, you will see imperfections and patterns in "just a wall". It's also a statement, it may cause reactions and cause viewers to question the boundary between art and not-art.
It's not my cup of tea compared to masterworks of Van Gogh or Homer or any of the legendary painters, but art goes through many phases and is used to express many different ideas. What I do think is bonkers is that modern artists (who are well-connected) may be paid millions of dollars for these works, which to me don't showcase skill and talent, but which reward creative ideation and concepts.
I was thinking something along these lines. Based on the first Wiki article, Klein was involved in developing this pigment. If so, the work stands on the merits of that achievement alone. He was, for that moment, literally the only person in the world that could have created that painting.
I took my then 5 year old daughter to the Tate for the exhibition and it had the same effect on her, while almost everything else on show had no effect at all. The only other thing she loved was Bridget Riley, and I think Yves Klein's blue work is somewhere in the same realm - the art is in defining something that makes the viewer's brain do some of the work, that is going to be experienced slightly differently by everyone who sees it.
"Why these all-white paintings are in museums and mine aren't" [1]
One woman was conducting the tour for three people, when they stopped at one of these all-white paintings.
She was describing the potential meaning behind the work, and noted that sometimes the artist expresses textures, or covers some background work.
It's hard to describe, but I felt this sort of absurdist joy when I watched all four of them lean in very closely for half a minute, only to discover absolutely nothing unique about the work in its texture or color.
Maybe sometimes art isn't made for the observer, but the observer's observer.