Personally I love all forms of art, modern art is ok I mean, I dont hate it but I prefer paintings where I know what I'm looking at. Then again, modern art was the only section of art class I excelled at...turns out I'm good at splashing random lines and blobs of paint

I've been inside the Sistine Chapel. That's real art. Everything else in regards to paintings and statues can get burned and broken for all I care.

neither is an image that really surves a purpose. any thoughts that any one argues that can be produced by one is simply subjective. the painting itself does not create the thoughts or philosophy, its the people who look at them that produce those thoughts.

besides most modern art is not that modern, look at van gogh and cubism is over a 100 years old now.

Hard, if not impossible to say if contemporary art is good or bad as a whole as there is such a broad range of different works in that area. I've seen things I liked, also seen things I hated.
As for modern abstract art I quite like the works of http://thecia.com.au/reviews/p/images/pollock-4.jpg. I think abstract art is the most controversial, with some people loving it and some people seeing it as just scribbles. I don't like things like http://fahmoda.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/mondrian1.jpg, which I find boring. Things like that are all down to subjectivity though.

Things like a blank canvas or signing a house brick are the things that annoy me though and shouldn't be labeled art, since there should be at least some creation in the process, that's where the word creativity comes from and for me, art is something creative.

As for skill, I think some abstract modern art is not easy to recreate or be done by anyone, for example it's very easy to get muddy colours when mixing paint, or making the composition too noisy or crowded or overloading them on bright colours. Older traditional art may take longer to paint but I don't doubt the skill of Pollock, just as I wouldn't doubt the skill of Turner.

I don't think contemporary art has to be abstract though. I'm not sure how http://serenityunicorn.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/leonid_afremov_art_work_1.jpg labels his work but I'd personally put it under contemporary, and I love it.

On a side note, I study contemporary dance which is equally as broad as contemporary art. Some things I like but there are some styles I hate. A person standing still on a stage and calling it dance is for me just as pretentious as hanging up a blank canvas and calling it art.