The twelve hapless faces of art

I feel like that moment in a dream when the teacher called us all up to the front desk, where he had lain out in a row the twelve objects, and asked us to put the ones that were Art on one side, and the ones that were Not Art on the other.

It was a summer's day; he saw me turning away, frustrated and sad, and it was as if, as he moved to the side of the desk and placed a hand gently on my shoulder, I could already smell the coffee on his breath. It was an unfamiliar scent to which I was entirely indifferent -- a scent that led nowhere.

"Well, you see," he began, amiably enough: "if you can't even begin to reduce this thing ... But I do know what it is that you are trying to do."

"You know what *I* am trying to do?" I repeated.

"You believe in something you call art," he said. "I'm not here to take your beliefs from you. That's not my place. But I *am* here to make you question. Because that *is* my place, you see ... And I do still need an answer from you."

"Let them all be art, then," I said.

"What, all?" He smiled, as if this were too easy, easier than he had anticipated: "Even the hunk of concrete? And the -- the orange bus?" he added with tentative indulgence, as though secretly he pitied me now, and wanted to keep me from stumbling further than I must.

"Yes," I said, sensing that by refusing him a trial, by refusing him the opportunity to argue the part, I was actually taking something away from him, the irrefutable truth of something else which he might have spotted in passing, if he had only been looking.

"So of course, by extension, the entire world is art, then, is it not?" he concluded.

"Yes," I said, the spite in me hiding in a corner, and turning itself round and round. I was watching a great locomotive forcing itself further and further down a dead siding out of sight. And, for a fleeting instant, I felt so clearly: "If you could only experience the pain of this, the pain of what we do to ourselves like this, then you would know instantly, without even trying, what it is we are arguing about."