text – A Celebration of Reading

In a recent post I speculated that people who declare that they love to read and devour any source from cereal boxes to soup cans might be expressing a need for the physical act of reading, almost like autism. That conjecture is probably a bit over the edge but recently I have been exposed to a few readers who have problems with reading unless the text is physically familiar and easy to read like they were taught in the second grade. To me, and coming from the other direction, this also suggests that the physical process of reading must be familiar and must avoid complexity or controversy lest the reader get a little out of sorts and consider banging their head against the wall.

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I watched a documentary on the Museum of Modern Art the other day and it was not only a fascinating history of both the museum and the artists it has collected through the years but it also posed several questions about that art. Specifically questioning what is modern art? I highly recommend this documentary to everyone but I viewed it on my Roku from a long-forgotten video site so you may have to do some digging to find the video for yourself.

One thing struck me while watching the video: modern art in many ways was involved with altering the way we see things. Not just a group of prostitutes, but a collection of planes and lines, or a collection of colors, or some other way of categorizing the visible other than what might be captured in a photograph. Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’avignon was considered to be perhaps the one painting that forever changed the world of art.

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