But is it...?

I won't pretend to know much about art. Our art lessons as school were nothing but discouraging unless you were already good at drawing and painting. We learnt nothing about art history, nothing about different forms of art, and nothing about what one might call the theory of art.

But I did love music and one of the great things about pop music from the Beatles onwards was that it had a large 'frame'. By frame, I mean what went around it: there was the band, the artwork on their records, and the references they made both in the artefacts they produced and in their interviews with the NME, Melody Maker, and Record Mirror. (These days, I find that frame can be very small.)

Over forty years of listening to music has given me something of a haphazard education in that area of the arts and also a little insight into others. For example, I can see that abstract painting can be enjoyed in the same way as, say, one of Eno or Sylvian's ambient pieces. And I've also learnt a bit about artistic method, about process, and about the debatable inherent value of ideas.

So, for example, an artist might paint a portrait. When it's finished, we might appreciate it for the technical skill, for the colours, the likeness (if we knew the subject) and other such attributes of a finished product. Then you have someone like Rothko, who painted with a really interesting process that led to some quite uniquely beautiful pieces (even if, at first glance, they might just look like big blocks of colour). And then you have those pieces that really are little more than ideas or representations of ideas. If they don't generate anything of interest, though, I struggle to enjoy them.

To me - and please allow for my limited education in this area - 'classical' art is about the finished product. Modern art seems to have an emphasis on process and ideas. 

I think a lot of us find it particularly satisfying when the final product is enjoyable (or, perhaps, admirable) and there is also some story to the development or process, even when it's unintentional. 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is a great song but I love it all the more for the fact it's constructed from two different versions with different tempos, played in different keys. Lennon told George Martin that he wanted the first half of one version and the second half of the other. And when the engineer attempted to this, he started by matching the tempos only to find this put both versions in the same key, so they could easily be joined together: a very happy accident!

This all came to mind today when the Minx and I visited the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. We'd had a leisurely breakfast, strolled back to the apartment for a read, and then headed out to have a wander around the gallery. I must say that I loved the building but I was a bit more bemused by the contents; there were plenty of ideas and evidently quite a bit of process, but I just didn't find the final pieces particularly interesting or attractive.

I did like this, though: an inverted, suspended VW Beetle, refashioned as a bed. To be honest, I'm not sure to what extent it's art or, indeed, how one would measure or define that. It's definitely creative, though, and it made me smile.