Is some of this stuff really art?

[itsmarty]

My wife and I discussed this on Saturday, having stopped into the Smithsonian's modern art building to use the restroom on our way to the National Gallery of Art. That probably says a lot about what we enjoy [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

We did spend some time there, however, both because we knew we'd see things we liked and because my best friend is a sculptor and I know it's tough to work on things that few people will ever appreciate.

We got to talking after looking over a blank black canvas, and a few others like this:



We did, however, enjoy this one. I couldn't tell you why.



I think it comes down to education. Once you learn a lot about a subject, you appreciate subtleties that don't mean anything to novices and often seem trivial or "stupid" to them. This is just supposition when it comes to art, since I have no real understanding of it, but I know how stupid I sound to my wife when I'm trying to explain the beauty of a well-written Linux shell script or a particularly nice ball in soccer. I'm willing to accept that a neon sentence saying "four words four colors" probably really is art, even it looks like a craptastic waste of time to me.

Martin