In an effort to become more cultured I spent an afternoon at the Portland Art Museum. I don’t know know much about art, and I know less after leaving the museum. The main exhibit showed the works of Ellsworth Kelly. Mostly these were geometric shapes with two, sometimes three, colors. While I didn’t understand exactly what was going on I did note that he was very good at coloring inside the lines. It seemed important how the piece changed when placed next to a similar shape with alternate colors. These pieces couldn’t exist alone, they were dependent on context.
What interested me most was the contemporary art exhibit. Suddenly I felt like I could be an artist. Some of the pieces were complex, I guess. Others less so, haphazard splatters on canvas. But one piece in particular stood out, a miniature depiction of Kandor, Superman’s home planet. It had everything I wanted. It was shiny, it glowed, and it looked like it would be fun to play with. If there’s a moral to this story it’s that I don’t want to look at art I want to interact with it, preferably with action figures in hand.