Okay, apparently I am firmly bourgeoisie…sue me. I like some paintings and sculptures, but I obviously don’t understand art. I can’t paint much more than a French manicure, or draw much past stick figures (and it amuses me to put stick critters’ legs and L-shaped feet all in one line), and the last time I tried to sculpt anything, it was Play-Doh doll furniture for Andrea when she was a kid, but come on…this is art?

I never paid much attention, but I suppose on some level, I’d known that Jackson Pollock was an abstract painter (I refuse to use the word “artist”), but that catastrofuck up there, painted in 1948, sold for $149,000,000.00. Yes, that’s “million“, and I have no idea why. I was scrolling through a list of most expensive paintings, and was not surprised to see Picasso, Van Gogh, Rubens, Renoir and Cézanne, but Pollock? Furthermore, that painting? It looks like someone turned two six-year-olds loose with a bucket of mud, a bucket of tar and some of that puffy tube-paint that old ladies use to make “I love my grandkids” sweatshirts. I looked Pollock up on an art site to see whether all of his stuff is as terrible as this, and….yep, it is. Picasso is kind of fucked up, what with putting body parts and facial features in new and exciting places, but at least you can sort of see where he was going with it. A jug and a bunch of fruit on a table doesn’t exactly make me gasp at the beauty and marvel at Cézanne’s remarkable talent, but at least it looks like…a jug and a bunch of fruit on a table. I gotta give props to Rubens because I like his stuff even if he liked his ladies on the voluptuous side, and I always did like that ballet class one…Degas, maybe? Dunno, but it’s all soft edges and colours, and I like to look at it because you can almost feel an “anticipation”.

Another of Pollock’s; called No. 5. I guess even he didn’t think it worthy of an actual name, and I can’t say I disagree. This is not art. This is a shite mess of paint splatters that any child would be pleased to be allowed to produce.

Ah, found it. This is, in my bourgeoisie opinion, art, and since I won’t remember, it is Degas, and it’s called École de Danse.

I wish I could remember the name of the one P. sent to me many years ago. All I can recall is that the artist was Russian, no one I’d heard of at the time, and the subject was a distant view of one horse, alone in a field. I quite liked it, but lost the only copy I had when he commandeered all of my floppies to save his stuff when we moved down here. We shared a computer then, so I didn’t have a copy on the HDD because that was “wasting space”. God, I hated sharing a computer, especially with Mr. No You Don’t Need Anything Fun Or Pretty Because It Wastes Space And Resources. Anyway, I liked the painting, and perhaps I’ll run across it again someday.