Several years ago, I attended a cocktail party in suburban New Jersey. The hostess, a friend of my mother’s whom I’d known my whole life, dragged me away from the group I was chatting with to look at a small, framed abstract painting hanging in the corner of her living room. Knowing I was an abstract painter, she wanted my opinion of the colorful smears and smudges that filled up the tiny picture. I told her it was nice, at which point she smugly revealed to me that her 3-year-old grandson had painted it. It tickled her pink to have caught me not knowing a little kid had painted the picture.

Talk about a trap. Respect for my mother, not to mention plain old politeness (I’m not the Jackson Pollock pee-in-Peggy-Guggenheim’s-fireplace type of artist), required me to say something nice about the picture, and I had obliged. I’d like to say that I guessed a child had painted it, but I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking about who’d painted it at all. All I knew was that I was staring at yet another mediocre painting, zillions of which are out there in the world.

A lot of people think abstract art is one big hoax. They’re correct to think that it can look easy to do (Malevich’s squares), or that it frequently emerges out of gobbledygook intentions (theosophy inspired Kandinsky and Mondrian, and it’s at least a tad on the whacky side). On the other hand, what’s so hard about painting a realist painting nowadays, when even a no-talent can transfer images and paint textures straight from a computer to a canvas?

Abstract painting is surrounded by a halo of uncertainty. It’s constructed out of the artist’s ideas and imagination, and is only loosely — if at all — connected to nature. Because abstract art emerged out of the general crisis of meaning brought on by modernity — one that’s ongoing — serious abstraction continues to be marked by a certain degree of doubt and anxiety. To see anything in it at all requires a “willing suspension of disbelief.” Like religion, abstract art yields meaning only when it’s experienced inside a protective bubble.

Back to the trap. The hostess didn’t actually care to hear my painter’s opinion about her little grandson’s art. She was a spider, and I was her fly. If she’d wanted an opinion about the art on her wall, she wouldn’t have asked me in the first place. As Leonardo argued, opinions from friends are worthless and inevitably result in lies. Opinions from enemies are the only ones that count.

It’s true that I was cheesed off at the time. (Who likes to be caught in a “gotcha” moment?) I’d somehow neglected to remember Duchamp’s Lesson Number One: Human beings see art only when they already know it’s art.

There are two morals to this story: First, if you want a truthful opinion, find yourself an enemy. Second, if you strive to be a Kantian truth-teller, avoid parties where there’s art on the walls.

(Photo by Flickr user Lisa Williams)