John Rotterdam thought last Friday would be like any other. Sure, he had agreed to go to some “boring-ass” museum with his girlfriend and live-in roommate, Nancy Williams, but he was planning on having a great night afterwards. The Knicks were playing the Heat in Miami, and he had already made a bet with long time buddy, Jimmy.
“I had even bought a six-pack of Killian’s. Man, I love that stuff,” said John on Saturday afternoon.
What John didn’t realize was that the travelling Picasso exhibit was on display at the Museum of Modern Art, and it would prove to be an exhibit that he would remember forever.
Perhaps a little background: John had a long history of disliking modern art. It all started when John was very young. A very young John was frolicking through some meadows near his house when he found a painting. It was Piet Mondrian’s “House of Ill Repute,” a red square on a blue background. Why a famous French artist’s painting was in a meadow in upstate New York is interesting in and of itself, but that is beyond the scope of this Thought. Regardless, instead of seeing some sort of lusty sexual imagery (as the title of the piece suggested) the very young John only found a red square on a blue background. “This sucks,” proclaimed John at a very young age. Later on, the less young John really started disliking modern art. Not only was he the founding member of the “Dislike Modern Art Club” in High School, he would purposely draw proportional and realistic paintings over Alexander Calder mobiles. He would even go so far as to occasionally write letters to famous artists with scathing commentaries like, “If I can do it, then it’s not art. Stupid.”
Needless to say, John didn’t want to go to the Museum that night, but with a great deal of urging from Nancy, he finally went. “He is really lazy sometimes, so it takes a great deal of urging,” commented Nancy.
What John found as he entered MoMA was a retrospective of Picasso’s works tracing from his early periods of expressive realism to his more well-known cubist works.
“Yo, I thought that Picasso just drew people who looked all messed up, but it turns out that he can actually draw if he wants to,” said John with a look of abject surprise. “I mean, he’s pretty good.”
John went on to find out from the recorded tour guide that Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol could also draw better than their works suggested. “Even Mondrian did some really kick-ass drawings of people and stuff.”
John still thought that modern art “sucked” but he entertained the thought of entering the field. “Hey,” said John to his girlfriend at dinner, “if any idiot can just cut of his ear and become really famous, by making crappy paintings and stuff, I can probably do it, too.”
Nancy’s reply, “Go right ahead and try dear, go right ahead and try,”