WHAT ADULTS DON’T KNOW ABOUT ART

A treatise on why art matters.

Claiming no author more specific than the publisher itself, this teaching manual opens with a presumptuously intimate tone and preposterous assertions. The narrator tells readers that they (“you”) have probably been interested in art for a long time without knowing it: When “you” made drawings as a (younger) child or saw illustrations in picture books, you didn’t recognize it as art because “probably no one told you these were art.” Adults are oblivious too—asked why art matters, they say only, “Because it’s very old” or “Because it costs a lot.” This isn’t textual humor or playfulness; the tone seems to be serious. Like adults, art books are useless; galleries and museums are boring and dry. So who can explain why art matters? Only this book, brazenly, conjuring straw man after straw man: Straw adults, straw books, straw museums and galleries, straw upper-class readers. Repeatedly correcting nonexistent myths and assumptions nobody ever made, the text labels art a “tool” to use for six specific things: “Remembering, Appreciation, Hope, Sadness, Balance, [and] Making Sense of Money.” Some truths appear—art, indeed, inspires emotion and new viewpoints; art, indeed, helps people cope with life—but the book’s categorizations are nonparallel and bizarre. The fine-art reproductions are mediocre, their interpretations narrow or, sadly, off-base. Perhaps saddest of all is the absence of any notion that art matters, also, for aesthetic reasons—like beauty.

Ill-informed and bafflingly arrogant.