Tiling the fluff

What does Home Depot grout, broken bathroom tiles, and an unfinished wooden violin make? If you say junk, then you've obviously not been introduced to contemporary art. No, really, if Damien Hirst can 'paint' a canvas with feces-covered flies, then my crappy 'mosaic' of things-I-found-at-the-recycling-center is a modern day, Caravaggio's David. Okay, that's a stretch, but I made my point.

Sometimes I think contemporary art is just full of bull shit, mental masturbation for the mathematically challenged. I count myself in that pool. What does all this have to do with medical school? Tenously, I'm attending an SMFA art course, and the instructor has given me a wooden, unfinished violin to decorate. The finished product will be auctioned at some event to raise money for health care issues in Boston. It's a noble cause, but I don't really have time. But she insisted, and I obliged, so now I'm staring at a beautifully carved Suzuki violin--naked without its glossy veneer--and thinking of ways to mutilate the poor creature. "I'll chop it up and make it useless (Picasso anyone?), I'll decoupage it with pictures of models' body parts (hmm, too literally Pop), I'll charr the surface and expose its innards (hmm, too serial-killer like)..." the endless possibilities seem to pour out of my head.

No, I think I'm going to tile it. I don't know why really, but I've just always had the urge to do some tiling and mosaic work, but never found anybody willing to let me redo the kitchen floor. Of course, I had to 'justify' my work (apparently, wanting to make something beautiful needs an explanation of what is beauty, too) and so I made up some metaphysical dish about entrapment and beauty and capturing the transient...blah blah blah to titillate my professors. I did this over lunch, 3 paragraphs in 15 minutes. The write-up is so vague it practically warrants its own explanatory writeup. They loved it, gobbled it up, ate it with an excitement that I could only imagine as similar to the way art critics practically wet themselves everytime Andy Warhol made another soup can print back in the day.

I sincerely hope that they were just being nice. I know artists can be on the fluffy side, but this was nothing but hot air.