Thoughts on Picasso

well,
some people try to pick up girls
and get called an asshole
this never happened to pablo picasso
he could walk down your street
and girls could not resist to stare
and so pablo picasso was never called an asshole

well, the girls would turn the colour of avocado
when he would drive down thier street
in his el dorado
he could walk down your street
and girls could not resist to stare
pablo picasso never got called an asshole
not like you

The Modern Lovers - Pablo Picasso

So while I was in Barcelona I had a chance to visit the Picasso museum, and it got me thinking that, for me, Picasso is a very polarizing figure (as I'm sure he also is for many other people). Is he a genius because he brings out beauty in even the ugliest of images? Or were his paintings just random pieces of crap? Or was he in fact a genius for making us believe he was a genius even though his works were pieces of crap?
The thing with Picasso is, looking as his earlier paintings, the dude can definitely paint. His earlier stuff looked like the normal drawings that we are used to seeing (they looked like recognizable shapes and figures from everyday life). But then he entered his cubist stage.... and shit got weird. I can't even pretend to get a lot of Picasso's cubist stuff, and honestly, I don't think most art critics do either. They're just afraid to say "I don't get it" as they'd then be considered too juvenile and un-cultured to continue in their profession. To me, it just seems like either Picasso slowly went nuts and/or started to use a bunch of acid, and these were the images he saw. But does that necessarily make them great? You could give a kid a bunch of markers and they could draw something comparable. And the thing is, Picasso was a perverted fuck. If i turned in anything remotely like some of his sketches into my high school art class I would've been sent to a psychologist before I could count to three. Yet, because Picasso drew it, we consider it a work of genius.
On the other side, maybe his works are truly special. Maybe he woke up one day and said 'fuck it' to artistic convention. Fuck the idealized, Renaissance view that is still our litmus test for art today. Picasso was going to change everyone's perception of what art is. And, if this was indeed his intention, it seems that he truly accomplished it. But his shit was still out there, and for the life of me I can't understand why Picasso's work was so universally accepted when if any other artist had crated such images they would be criticized as being nothing more than trash.
Maybe he was a visionary. Maybe he just happened to go crazy at the right place at the right time. Or maybe I just don't fucking get art. Whatever the case may be, the popularity of Picasso and his works still boggles my mind and makes me wonder, do I only like his work cause other's like it? And for that matter, do I like his work? All I know for a fact is that Picasso does have some paintings that I find amazing, and some other pieces that I find absolutely horrendous, but in the end, if I wanted a self-portrait, I'd probably go get Michaelangelo to draw it. I guess I just like pictures of myself where my eyes and lips are easily distinguishable.