Glitter and Macaroni

Remember a couple entries ago when I mentioned that I don't know anything about anything? Yeah, and a couple before that when I mentioned I had no class? Right, cool. Keep those thoughts in your head and then imagine me at the Spanish Art Exhibit at the Guggenheim today.

I know zero, absolutely, about art. I don't know who paints what, I don't know what pictures are supposed to represent, and I especially can't tell the difference between what's good and what sucks.

Actually, I should give myself a little credit. I know some things. I can identify Rothko because it's just a bunch of stupid squares. Picasso's pretty obvious. I know him because I always see his work and want to say "Ah, miss, your eye. Your eye is drooping again, shall I show you to the ladies room?" But that's it.

So today, I'm walking up the giant seashell looking at the nice pictures and reading the walls along the way, and I'm trying my super hardest to think of something intelligent to notice, but all my brain did was categorize them into two main groups and a couple subgroups.

The main groups were "Paintings that Look Like Something" and "Paintings that Only Sorta Look Like Something." Within the latter group, each work was either "Looks Like a Person" or "Looks like a Food, Sheep's Skull, or Nothing." Within the first group ("Paintings that Look Like Something"), it was either "Contains Exposed Breasts and/or Midgets" or "Doesn't."

As you can expect, the only things I thought of to say were along the lines of "She's totally falling out of her top" or "Wow, that's a lot of grapes" or "Man, imagine sitting for 8 hours while someone paints you and then having it look like that." I mostly kept my thoughts to myself.

So, try as I might, I learned absolutely nothing about Spanish art today. And of course, there were tons of people around me who were all "Yes, clearly Picasso was employing this technique" and "Hmmm, indeed, it would seem that this is a new paradigm for Cotán" and "Hobbity-hob-hob-hob..." so that made me feel real good.

It wasn't the exhibit's fault. They had some prime information on the walls, though I sadly had no context through which to interpret it. Don't get me wrong, some of the pieces were really great to look at, and I had a really nice time, but as we walked through, I thought more and more how I'd probably be better of with a nice rubber ball or maybe a four-piece jigsaw puzzle with a duck on it.

Because I know about ducks. They say 'quack' and waddle around. I can relate to that.