Returning from the grocery store this evening, I walked past the art museum and passed a pair of people exiting the sculpture garden. I overheard one of them, a German fellow, say to his companion in beautifully accented English:

"If you can't figure out what it is, it's art."

I didn't find it quite as funny as she did.

The great tragedy of the modernist movements of the last hundred years isn't that they've lowered the bar for technical excellence or eroded classical values or any of the other criticisms that classically-minded people like to level at them; rather it's that they RAISED the bar on criticism, commentary, and rhetoric so much that, word-by-word, the layman was removed from the dialogue as art criticism became a highly specialized discipline in its own right.

I've read chapters -- yes, entire chapters -- centered around Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and strong cases have been made for why it's important (Newsweek thinks it's the most important painting of the last 100 years) but all this doesn't change the fact that I think it's ugly as shit. That's alright, isn't it? Of course I'm entitled to my opinion, but a person who thinks they know better would tell me that I'm just not getting it, wouldn't they?

The arts will always be evaluated on two planes: the sensual, and the intellectual. For the art critic - a writer - it is an unfortunate truth that his chosen medium, words, are a far better vehicle for concepts than sensation. Even a thorough description of sensation (a flat yellow plane, just paler than canary and with the smoothness of cream, having a nearly random dispersion of tiny, blood-red flecks, being in heavier concentration near the top-right corner) can yield wildly different syntheses in the mind's-eye of the reader. On the other hand, "the first of its kind," (assuming the kind has been well-defined), is a statement that can only be interpreted one way.

And so the art writer tends to write about the things that his medium facilitates: what happened when, who knew who, who said what, who saw what, who paid what, what was intended, what was understood. Out of all this data comes conflicting and contentious valuations based on everything BUT the sensual aspects of a piece, and this dominates the dialogue. If a layman steps in and says, "yes, but it looks like a piece of moldy broccoli and I don't like it" the reply is "ah, but who has painted a piece of moldy broccoli before? Hm? And why don't you like moldy broccoli? You've closed your mind to the beauty of moldy broccoli, and if only you'd broaden your appreciation, you'd get it. Besides, you're lacking context. The artist's statement is blah blah blah, in direct conflict with so-and-so's concept of blah blah blah, influenced in part by the blah blah school of blah blah..."

None of that changes the fact that it looks like moldy broccoli, but in the face of such expertise on a subject, one can start to question their own valuation of a piece.

But the critics can't bear the entire weight of the guilt here (they're easy targets, though). They happen to be right sometimes when bemoaning the intellectual vacuity of the layman. Billions of people in this world inexplicably hold to the notion that manufactured images are meant to be depictive, and when you can't tell what's being depicted, the artist (as opposed to the designer, who is allowed to be abstract) has failed to do his job. I hate to be a smart-ass (that's a lie), but sometimes the correct answer to "what is it supposed to be?" is:

"A picture."

"I just don't get it" is defeatism, and "you just don't get it" is elitism. I welcome neither. The layman should recognize the validity of his gut-level valuation of art (would you let an intellectual talk you out of how attractive you think your significant other is?), while avoiding the temptation to reject the validity of the art scholar's highly informed valuation. For me, I like things for both reasons. Despite my feelings on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, I think Picasso was a genius, and I love a lot of his work on a purely sensual level. Alternatively, I think Kazimir Malevich's Black Square is about the best thing ever for almost purely intellectual reasons (although it is a very nice-looking black square, isn't it?)

But let's get back to what the German guy said: "If you can't figure out what it is, it's art."

When I heard it I sort-of ran through the short-form version of what I just wrote in my mind. It only took a second or two, thank goodness, and then I was on another track which was much more fun. I remembered a piece of metal I'd picked-up on the side of the road a few weeks ago in Astoria. I couldn't figure out what it was (although my dad dispelled the mystery immediately and told me it was a tire weight, and that they're very common on the sides of roads), but it had a kind of quality to it. It was pocked and pitted and had this interesting oblong seed-pod sort-of shape to it, and I liked it. And what the German guy said was nearly right at that moment, and in all moments, only missing a small clause: if you can't figure out what is is, and you want to think of it as such, it's art.

And there's nothing wrong with that.