Yesterday Dr. Boli had a little too much to say about current trends in art, and specifically about how we judge art entirely by its utility, which is to say by the message it conveys. He brought up some examples of exhibits by living artists at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Our frequent correspondent “Maypo” asked,

What is the good Doctor’s prediction of the timing of when the Carnegie Museum’s patrons lose their collective patience with this nonsense?

Dr. Boli thought this over, possibly for as much as thirty seconds, and came up with the answer he is sure is correct: when it is replaced with a different nonsense.

That is, after all, what has always happened in the past. The discussion came up in the first place because of an abstract expressionist work “of a purely decorative nature” by Virgil Cantini.

Much of abstract expressionism was arguably nonsense, but the whole point of it, and the thing the average yokel objected to, was that it had no message. As much as you could mock abstract expressionism, it trusted the viewer to make an interpretation of the work—or no interpretation, as Cantini apparently believed—from the work itself. Now you can ask what a work means and be given a correct and indisputable answer: “It means we should be aware of the marginalized living among us.” How do you know? “Because it has ‘be aware of the marginalized living among us’ written in 512-point Franklin Gothic on the front.”

But the great wheel keeps turning. There will come a time when art for the sake of message is old-fashioned, and only the yokels and the philistines will come to the museum looking for something with words on it that will tell them what to think. We might suppose that will be a glorious day for art. But it probably will not be. It will probably be the triumph of a different kind of nonsense that we have not been able to predict. But it will displace the nonsense that is current today.