Posted 4:28 PM by Anonymous

Too bad you didn't like the Yoko Ono exhibit, Raymond. I've never experienced any of her work myself, but one of my favorite folksingers is a huge fan and has lots of stage banter about her so I've heard about her work. Now I'm not an art history buff, but I don't think it's really accurate to broadly describe Ono's work as "modern art", which I would think is more of a timeframe than a real genre. I think Ono's work is better described as conceptual art, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as "an art form in which the artist's intent is to convey a concept rather than to create an art object". In other words, it's idea over form. That said, I can't say that Ono's work really sounds like my cup of tea. Sol Lewitt, a major minimalist conceptual artist, is my least favorite artist ever. He's the one who made the infamous incomplete open cubes. Or perhaps you've seen one of the wall drawings he commissioned other people to make in his name. Right.

That said, I thought it was interesting how people are so much less accepting of conceptual art than they are of say, conceptual movies or literature. Everyone loves books and films that are different and make you think, but when it comes to art, we demand something pretty, or at least clever. I think it's because of our society's early addiction to blurry water lilies and starry nights.

Anyways, this weekend I also went to an art museum. I was down in New York City visiting some friends from school and we checked out the Whitney Museum of American Art. It's a really great, if smallish, museum with an excellent permanent collection and fantastic temporary exhibits as well. I really loved the Joan Mitchell exhibit, and they also have that famous Vera Lutter camera obscura print of the Pepsi-Cola sign. I think it's famous; I've seen it before at a photography exhibit at the Wadsworth here in Hartford. It's a really cool print; it's about 7 feet by 14 feet and was made (as far as I understand it) using the basic procedure of a pinhole camera, except the "pinhole" in this case was the window of the room. I was pretty impressed.

Okay, that's enough uneducated rambling about art from little old me.