I suspect you mean "contemporary" or "current", not "modern". Unfortunately, "modern art" (at least for painting) got co-opted for Picasso and such, and it's been a while since him.

I have a notion that canons aren't an inevitable part of art, but appear if people happen to build them.

Part of this is that I lived through a transition (I'd put it sometimes in the 80s) when it was no longer possible to keep up with print science fiction. Before that, it was possible to have a shared knowledge base of both the second rate stuff and the first rate.

At least for the Western canon, part of what was going was the contradictory belief that there was universal art that people had to be educated to appreciate.

At the point, the quantity and availability of art has gone so high (and both are likely to increase), that I think it's going to be harder and harder for any group to act as gatekeepers to say that liking some art is proof of worthiness.