Art, More or Less

Thursday I spent half my day at the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in suburban Maryland, looking at old artifact collections from along the Anacostia River in Washington. That part was really great, and I hope to have pictures next week. The Museum Support Center is just what you would expect in a gigantic remote facility housing little used museum collections -- vast, dim, full of endless corridors lined with thousands of identical white cabinets. But outside the entrance is a small collection of "art," ten or so mainly abstract sculptures. It isn't a great place to look at art -- the shot above gives a good sense of the environment -- and the sculptures do nothing for me.

I don't hate them; I just don't feel anything at all about them.

Well, maybe I hate this one.

But otherwise they just leave me cold.

Art is a mysterious thing. It's hard to say why we should care about it, but some of us do-- art that I love makes me feel good, and art that I hate makes me angry, and art that intrigues me fills me with a sense of possibility. Whatever the "art instinct" is, I have a powerful case of it. Stuff like this just doesn't trigger it in any way.

So, yeah, whatever.