Art???

After many years of sitting in my room reading, I made a friend.
I was standing in a line on my first day at a new school. I was nervous, and as always when I'm nervous I was saying very random ackward things. I could hear someone laughing, then she tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could be my friend.
Although we had many things in common, we also had many differences.
For one, she was a hopeless romantic. I am not. I never believed that one day someone would ride up on a white horse and sweep me off my feet. I was just happy if a a guy was nice to me when his friends were looking.
She didn't care what people thought or who was looking. I was forever shy and insecure.
She loved modern art. The more ridiculous the better.
I hate most of it.

Don't get me wrong. There are some incredible artists around today. However, I used to comment to people at my old job that I could take the outside ashtray when it was covered in snow and people were randomly sticking there cigarette butts into it, put it in a refrigerated room in a gallery in New York, call it something ridiulous like "Man Killing Nature" and sell it for thousands of dollars. If I'm pretentious enough while doing it, I could most likely pull this off with little to no effort.

When I was 17 my now closest friend moved back to her bithplace, Manchester England. When I was 18, a few months later, my parents purchased me a plane ticket for Christmas to visit her.
We had so much fun! She brought me to the pub she was working at. Oddly the same pub where the brothers from Oasis got there start. There I met some of the nicest people I have ever encountered. We went shopping, toured to different areas, ate in pubs, and visited many art galleries.
Here is where our differences became very evident.
When visiting older art museums I tended to wander away from the display of the week featuring the up and coming artist of the week, to older parts of the museum. This drove her crazy. Why could I not enjoy the artist on display.
Well, most of it was crap!
Quite literally on one particular occassion.
We went to a display for an artist who I just googled, it was very easy to find him as it seems he is the only one creating artwork with what is tastefully being called "Elephant Dung". Translations, he plays with Elephant poop!
This artist would put elephant poop on a canvas, decorate it with beads, and put it on display.

I'm gonna give you a moment to absorb what I just said.

You good? Or do you need another moment?

Okay, so after staring unimpressed at beaded poop, I wandered.
In this gallery I found temprarily there on display the original Lady of the Lake!
I love this painting! I could not understand why there were 2 schools on field trips there to look at poop, but none of them were coming to see this spectacular painting!
My friend was unimpressed by my wandering which began a small public argument where I denounced in front of many the talent of this artist, and called his work what I quite honestly felt it was, and what it quite literally was.

POOP!
7 years later I visited this friend again, this time in Scotland.
She again took me to galleries, this time featuring only modern art. While she wondered at the talent of a guy who drew a line with paint in his computer, printed it, glued it to a lite brite, then stuck 1 peg in it! I wondered if she would marvel at the full creations I had made with my lite brite as a child, that featured many colorful pegs instead of just 1.
Probably not.
But you never know, I could be on to something here!