I'm so used to The Kiss being a masterpiece out of the sheer force of its qualities (the passion, the reluctance, the dresses, the gold...) that I honestly struggle to see it from your point of view - she doesn't have a broken neck, she's "turtling" away from him. But i guess the eye of the beholder is what it is.
I do agree with your view of contemporary work though, it's hard to see the value of a lot of it (diamond skulls, broken mattresses, etc etc). Art has become an investment vehicle with a veneer of cultural education, so now the rulebook has gone out of the window.