Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way. Eli Broad, who, along with Donald Kaufman, perfected the art of building repetative Tract Housing.

I met a guy who plays the same game I played. Yoko Ono, after John Lennon offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail in her painting, Painting To Hammer A Nail.

Life is beautiful’ isn’t such an opulent assumption when seen through Ono’s keen and kind lens, Darren Bader who the New York Times Style Magazine describes As playful as he is provocative, interrogates the meaning of art itself. 

The second day we were in LA, we went to The Broad to see Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. I’m not sure what to make of the show; the LA Times says it is more mind than music. Which I completely agree with, but then they go on to say, She opens your mind; you make the music. which wasn’t my experience. Although I think it was Michele’s.

From the street, The Broad looks much more radical than LACMA, but inside it is a conventional museum, a very nice conventional museum, built around the private collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The museum was designed by a team led by Elizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, based in New York City. DS + R, as the architectural firm is called, has two of its most famous projects in its hometown of New York City, and both are conceptually innovative: the design of The High Line Park* and the recent transformation of MOMA. BTW, Elizabeth Diller is an architectural superstar: she was on TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list and the first MacArthur Foundation fellow awarded in architecture. End Aside.

Yoko Ono is a conceptual artist, which makes it hard to show much. Visibly shown, that is. Her typed or written ideas can be shown, but they are ideas, not images. As an aside, I was listening to an interview – I don’t remember with whom or the interviewer – with a Trump expert. One thing she, the Trump expert, said – in a derogatory way – was that Trump is very visual and, like a child, is best persuaded by pictures; charts showing information do not persuade him. I thought, Shit! That sounds just like me, how embarrassing. End aside.

Still, embarrassing as it may be, there was not much “art” that I resonated with at the show; a lot of ideas, several walls to mark up, and a handful of interesting vintage pictures.

Outside the Yoko Ono show, The Broad continued on its mission of collecting and showing – for free – contemporary art. Good contemporary art; Important Contemporary Art.

Looking at the large Jeff Koons sculpture, Balloon Dog, one of which sold for $58.4 million, got me thinking about Steven Soderbergh’s movie, The Christophers. It is about a family hiring a reformed art forger to finish some of their father’s unfinished paintings. He is a famous artist whose work sells for obscene amounts, and the family will get more money if the unfinished art is finished. At the time, the movie got me thinking – obsessing, may be more accurate – about art and what makes one artist important, famous, and expensive, and another artist an also-ran.

My mother used to say, “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, usually when she disagreed with somebody’s choice, but I don’t think she really believed it. And I’m not sure I do either. But what I do believe is that, to a great extent, the sales price of a piece of art is a result of secondary market forces like luck, timing, and dealer hype. And, as time goes on, how famous an artist is becomes the most important factor of all. People like name brands they recognize.

I went through that reconizing known brands, or the smug joy of knowing a artist’s name when we we saw the second huge El Anatsui sculpture – blanket? – made from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire in two days. This blanket was just like the one we had seen at LACMA the day before (no, no, not just like, but easily close enough so I could reconize the artist). In both cases the tapastries are huge and I think that is a big factor in what makes art. Size and complexity can make something a work of art even when it wouldn’t be if it were smaller.

I think that’s what makes Nolan’s Odasy a serious art picture; it’s size and complexity. We saw it in 70MM one night when we were in LA and, although it wasn’t a super huge screen, it was immersive in its detal. It was totally different from seeing a movie on TV.

*The High Line is a 1.45-mile public park and walkway built on an elevated, disused section of the former New York Central Railroad line along the West Side of Manhattan. It is regarded as a great example of transforming an abandoned industrial relic into a model of urban adaptive reuse.