at the museum...

We were at the Dallas Museum of Art last Saturday. They do have quite a variety in their collections, including ancient Egyptian and Greek, Asian and African, Byzantine, Renaissance, etc. But the 'front and center' exhibit on the main floor was modern art. Some modern art is good, but a lot is bad, and a piece's artistic merit should be judged completely separate from its content. (Artists who use their work just to make a socio-political statement are usually trying to cover up their poor design skills.)

The first display was made up of mirrors set in dirt and rocks. A rectangular box of mirrors set on the floor, propped vertically in piles of red rocks. Nine piles of gray dirt with mirrors supported horizontally between their peaks. A long row of dirt with about a dozen mirrors set vertically along the length. A few more variations on that theme. And the doodles... er, "design plans" for them, whose drawing quality could easily be surpassed by most junior high schoolers.

Then there were some stacks of glass, which made interesting light patterns - similar to those found in any stack of glass panes at a Home Depot. Then, little collages of cut-up maps with doodles. And so on. Towards the end of this celebrated mediocrity, I remembered an Ayn Rand-ian line from 'The Incredibles', and thought of an apt adaptation of it for that context:

"If everything is Art, then nothing is Art"