Modern Art

Can we all just agree that contemporary art is a waste of everyone's time and brain cells?

But I don't want to talk about art, really. It's just that I spent the day on my feet at those so-called bastions of high culture -- art museums, although I personally don't see how anyplace where some pissy, crying toddler in a stroller gets in for free while intelligent adults have to pay an entrance fee could be called cultured -- and I got more than my fill of oil paint splatters on canvas, thank you very much. There was a show at the Met: Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. The prints were worthwhile; the process and collaboration, not so much. After all, if you've seen one lithograph plate, you've seen them all -- it's a bit like opening your car's hood, taking out the transmission, and then hoping it does something interesting.

In fact, since the Met has two large rooms full of what amounts to a total of seven or eight different prints, it's more like taking out the transmissions of every car on a dealer's lot and hoping that one of them will do something interesting. I suppose that I could be overwhelmed by the detail and effort Close put into his work, but I'm not. He's an artist, that's his job, and it sure beats some guy who works for an investment firm and has to write a hundred and fifty page annual shareholders report.

Maybe I'm just misanthropic. 8-)