Kultur

One of my great regrets in life is that I never learned more about art and music when I was growing up. The arts aren't exactly a strong point for most American schools, and to be frank, while there were lots of great things about growing up in America's Finest City, it wasn't exactly a hotbed of high culture, especially living out in the 'burbs. I'm aware of this every time we go to museums here. Like today, we went to the Fondation Beyeler here in Basel. It's such a great building and setting that you could display a bunch of childrens' crayon drawings and it would still be world-class. Needless to say, that's not what they display. Right now they have two special exhibitions: Picasso and Magritte. We wanted to focus on Magritte, and while it was really interesting, I have to say I felt like such a cultural neophyte amidst the thousands of people who were intently studying each painting and presumably saying intelligent things about each one, albeit in German or French. Meanwhile, the extent of my commentary consisted of "I like that" or "I don't understand that one." (As an example of our intellectual discourse, at one point we came across a painting that was divided into four sections, and Gretchen said "that makes me think of a pizza quattro staggione." I'd like to think I had a clever and intelligent retort, but no.) You'd think it would help to read the program, for example for this painting:

Magritte had good reason to describe this work as pivotal for his development. Not only, as he said, did the painting have no "aesthetic preoccupation," but it emerged from a sort of inner necessity, as if under the influence of the unconscious mind. Above all, Magritte employed his characteristic visual language very systematically here -- a descriptive, object-affirming representation, but one whose "neutrality" recedes behind his overriding concern to convey content, and is further reduced by the material presence of sheet music and cutout silhouette...

I'm sorry, but when I read a description like that I just say "huh?". I suspect as long as I live in Europe I'll have a certain cultural inferiority complex...