If you say so!

It was tiny, green, and pleasant. Its little explosions of chocolate burst like little festivals in my mouth, creating new holidays with their ingenuity and finesse. It was a mint chocolate chip muffin, and it was mine. It’s might be a little bit pathetic that its taste is the most concrete image I retain from my visit to Paris, but to hell with conventional appreciation of culture—I love fluffy goodness. I’d love to talk about all the wonderful things I saw in Paris. The architecture was curvy and ye olde, the streets were cobblestoned in the cobblestoney way I’ve so come to love, and the people weren’t nearly as haughty and anti-American as I had imagined they would be. Strangely though, Paris didn’t inspire me to write. It inspired to me to think about Berlin, and it inspired me to think about the meaning of art.

            Who the hell says what art is? Apparently, shooting arrows into the façade of a building is art. Whoops, I just spilled my jam on the carpet. Better not clean that up: IT’S ART. Is art just art when the right people say it is, or does art need to convey a message?  And furthermore, does the public need to understand that message, or can anyone just pee on a canvas and display it in a gallery? I went to the Pompidou center in Paris, and that was just about the coolest museum I’ve ever seen. I’ve never actually been able to stare at a painting before, and I was able to. I examined every stroke, every medium, every tiny scribble and bead of the artists’ sweat. And then I turned the corner and saw the bane of my existence: ‘art.’

            It was large, blue, and unpleasant. Monochrome in Blue, it was called. I could have painted it in eight minutes. With my left foot.  When I was eight. Yet, something told me I should respect it. I promptly asked this something: why? Something furrowed its brow, gestured towards the painting, and said, “because it’s in a museum.” Someone, somewhere, thought it was fantastic. But who the hell says who the hell says what art is? 

In Berlin I was met with even fewer answers. Art was arrows in a wall. Art was a stuffed fox attached to a car door. Art was a gold plated street sign. Excuse me as I go vomit in a hat and display it in a gallery. Still though, I hate to be an art snob. I understand that many of these pieces make statements, and that many of these things actually move people. What I can't seem to understand though is how art is defined. Maybe I'll never know, or maybe I've learned that art needs no definition. How profound. How artsy.