"But is it art?"

Let's start on the ground floor, literally. The ground floor of Budapest's Fine Arts Museum. It's a neo-classical building built around 1900. It's one of two structures on either side of Heroes' Square, a monument built at the same time to commemorate 1,000 years of Hungarian monarchy. State propaganda at its best. 

It suffered serious damage in the 2nd World War, and the communists restored it in their typical unaesthetic, utilitarian fashion, leaving it in a grey institutional state until a renovated museum was unveiled in 2018. 

Now, the interior is, frankly, stunning. Between the various colors and textures of the different types of stone, and the unique palette and design sense of Hungarian interior decorating, surveying the various halls that make up the museum is almost worth the price of entry by itself (and have I mentioned that I get in free?). 

From the top of the entrance steps, you get a captivating view of Heroes' Square, a venue where momentous historical and cultural events have taken place, including the 1989 speech in which a youthful Viktor Orbán dared to tell the Soviet Army to go home, and not long after, a mass delivered by Pope John Paul the second after Hungary had become a republic. 

Once inside, you take the stairs to the ground floor and the entrance to the classical antiquity section. 

I quickly discovered that I still need to adjust my internal relationship to the museum. I'm still not used to my newly established status as a "professional scholar" (I quit my job as a corporate manager and became a teacher at a Waldorf school two years ago). The moment I entered the first room, with its exhibits of pottery from various parts of the Mediterranean, I started doing the exhibit shuffle: hurriedly looking at an object and quickly reading the information posted with it, and then quickly moving on to the next one. I was at about the third or fourth earthenware jar when it hit me. "Slow down, Bozo!" I said to myself. "You have all the time in the world!" So I did. About then I came across this beauty. 

This is an Etruscan pot from 700BC. If you didn't already know, the Etruscans were the culture that dominated the Italian Peninsula before the Romans grew up and took over. So, this pot was made about 300 years before Athens was at its peak. The documentation at the exhibit identifies the creature painted on it as a lion. This is one of those instances in which members of the general public will defer to "experts'" opinions. 

Lion. Sure. If you say so.

I'm not necessarily buying. What makes you so sure of that? 

I'm charmed by this image. It's like some critter out of a 1950s Warner Brother's cartoon that, when doing its best to be frightening, turns into nothing but a huge mouth with dozens of sharp teeth, supported by four spindly, beastly legs (I can just hear Mel Blanc's Tasmanian Devil snarl). It's reminiscent of some of Picasso's expressionistic elements. It's the kind of primitive art he'd dig. I wonder what Picasso thought of Warner Brothers cartoons?

Which brings me back to the title of this article: "But is it art?" I recall that this was a common punchline in 50s and 60s films and television comedies. It was a reflection of a milieu that brought us Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and other abstract painters, and later Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement. These artists and their works challenged the very idea of what art is. A human figure made of toothpicks and white glue? Is it art? John Lennon and Yoko One being interviewed in the nude in their Paris hotel room? Is it art? 

The Etruscans who made and used this pot, wouldn't have understood this question. The end user of this pot wouldn't have known the potter's name. Or, if he had, he would have simply known him as Bob the Potter. 

This is something the vast majority of contemporary humanity has no clue about. Our obsessive taxonomizing of the world into distinct, categories is a recent phenomenon. A category of human endeavor called "art" that was something apart from the business of building houses, making clothing, cooking meals, putting on theatrical entertainment and crafting tools was unknown. The one thing that might have fallen into its own category as art was poetry. The Romans loved a poet. Much of the written text that has survived the centuries to our day is poetry. Ovid's epic poem Metamorphosis is the primary source for our knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology.

An apt comparison is the separation of religion from culture in India. When westerners think of "Hinduism", they think it's confined to the devotional practices connected with the Indian gods. But the truth is, "Hinduism" is the entire way of life of non-Muslims in India: what they eat, the clothing they wear, marriage customs, the calendar of holidays, traditional dances and music, etc. Separating this into religion on the one hand and "culture" on the other is an academic conceit. 

To the ancient world, painting an abstracted beast that's all mouth and teeth onto a clay pot was, "just what we humans do."

Is blogging art? You know what? I don't care. I'm gonna keep going to the museum, getting out my notebook and fountain pens, musing on this and that, and see where this takes me. And I don't anticipate running out of material soon. The museum's like the Tardis: bigger on the inside than on the outside.