What is art, and who are you?

I have a confession to make: I am a philistine when it comes to art. (Here is another confession: I had to look up the word philistine to be sure I was using it correctly, and since I’m still not sure I am, I guess I’m a philistine in literary matters as well.)

I know what I like, as that stupid saying goes; I know what I don’t like, but I’m not too sure how you tell what is really great art and what is not. And reading the article about Andy Warhol in the New Yorker isn’t helping at all.

One guy says in order to recognize that Warhol’s Brillo boxes (for which he was sued by the graphic designer of the logo, which would have made quite an interesting court case (is it art or is it plagiarism?) if the guy hadn’t died soon after) are art, you have to understand art. Is a snake biting its tail in all of that?

But then another guy says that abstract art came along out of necessity, to show that manufactured stuff, like cute little big-eyed children or Hello Kitty stuff (or paintings of Brillo boxes?) isn’t art. But then what are you supposed to think when you come across a shovel in a museum?

It has always struck me as odd that you need theories to understand art. I can tell the difference between good writing and bad writing, good acting and bad acting, good movies and bad movies. I can do this without knowing any theories whatsoever; though it’s sometimes hard to explain my reasons. Somehow you just know.

I think the art appreciation part of my brain must be missing – maybe it’s in the same area as face recognition. In fact, rather than say I’m a philistine, let’s just say I’m prosopagnostic about art.

The hollow face illusion, or Who are you? Part Three

The illusion supposedly doesn’t work for schizophrenics, people under the influence of marijuana, and prosopagnosiacs (at least I’m in good company!).

Fortunately, though, it worked for me.

Who are you? Part Two

This is hilarious. Maybe I’m not so alone in my prosopagnosia.

Who are you?

I was in an office building one day recently when someone called my name. I had no idea who she was. We had worked at the same company, she told me, in the same division. Then, worse, she said she’d worked for me for a few weeks at the consulting firm I started!

This was all quite embarrassing, but I’m used to it by now. I pretend to recognize people, just in case. Like all the people I’ve interviewed for the column I used to write for my local newspaper – after spending an hour with them and taking their pictures, a week or a month or a year later I’d see them in town and have no idea who they were.

It’s called prosopagnosia, I finally learned from an article in Time magazine. Difficulty with face recognition. You can take a fun test here to see if you have it – fun, that is, if you don’t, but very difficult if you do.

When Harvard professor Ken Nakayama was studying prosopagnosiacs, he discovered their polar opposites: “super-recognizers” he calls them. These people can recognize celebrities from their childhood pictures, among many other talents.

So I told Chip about these astounding people – turns out he’s one of them. (But then he reads People magazine, so he has a slight advantage.) I knew I picked him for a reason.

But here’s the strange thing. The camp I went to as a teenager, where I later became a counselor, had a reunion recently. As a result, people have been emailing old camp pictures and current pictures of themselves, and I can recognize all of them: in the camp pictures, when they were younger than they were when I first met them; and as they are now, forty or even fifty years later.

They imprinted on me somehow, as have my family and friends, thank goodness. And I’m just as happy not cluttering up my brain with baby celebrities.