"Art"

I started two weeks of vacation today, so the Oriental Wife and I decided to get us some culture by heading to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

I am having a hard time deciding which was my favorite piece. Was it Fountain, a brilliant bisexual statement that shifted the foundation art from the silly and outmoded standard of aesthetic appreciation to the loftier plane of intellectual intent?

Or maybe it was Erased de Kooning, in which Robert Rauschenberg convinced abstract master Willem de Kooning to give him a pencil drawing, which the clever Rauschenberg promptly erased and claimed as his own masterpiece?

There were several pieces whose sheer genius overwhelmed me in the moment and left me unable to recall their titles.

There was the video of two homosexual satyrs in a bare room, engaged in some mysterious sado-masochistic romp.

There was the sheet of billowing blue cloth suspended over an ordinary electric fan.

There was the piece consisting of three canvases, all painted white, whose creative energy was surpassed only by the single canvas painted pitch black. I suppose one piece might have been called Day and the other Night, though your guess is as good as mine as to which was which.

There was the sheet of gray smudges, apparently made by repeatedly bouncing an ink-dipped basketball on the surface. The canvas was propped on a pile of bricks.

One piece, doubtless a subtle commentary on the commodification of sexual identity in post-industrial capitalist sociey, consisted of smears left by nude women rolling around in blue paint.

Oh sure, here and there there were sleepy nods to bygone trends such as the passe obsession with technique and skill.

Thankfully, only about 30 percent of the museum was dedicated to such quaint pieces, presumably kept there as a lesson to future artists about the conceptual shackles arising as a result of conforming to sunbordinated modes of thought left behind as relics of a defunct socio-economic structure.

Definitely a $25 well spent!