Social Filters

Artwork is The Winged Victory of Samothrace

There is a simple social filter I’ve developed over time. If you don’t like art, I probably don’t like you. Not in a moral sense, just real recognize real. If you can stand in front of a really good painting and feel nothing at all, if the entire project of human beings trying to record their thoughts and hallucinations in objects leaves you completely unmoved, then… Jesus.

Art is evidence that people have been trying to understand existence for thousands of years. It’s the fossil record of consciousness. When someone dismisses it as boring, pointless, or pretentious, it tells me something about their internal equipment. It suggests a certain resistance to curiosity. I don’t necessarily judge it, I just quietly adjust my expectations and move on.

That said, museums themselves are another matter. Museums are where art goes to become tired honestly. Fluorescent lighting, white rooms, small printed labels explaining things that were never meant to be explained in eleven-point font. Your feet hurt. There are twelve thousand objects and somehow you feel guilty for only truly looking at three. The building begins to feel like a tax audit conducted by history.

So if you tell me you can’t do museums, I understand completely. Museums can feel like being locked in a polite warehouse of human genius with the pressure of having to wander and ponder for a civilized period of time. But if you tell me you don’t like art at all, then we have a bigger problem.