V-day gift

Valentine’s Day is only two days away, and I’m feeling so loving that I want to do something special for all of you who write angry letters to the editor about me.\nI’m going to give you the week off. \nThat’s right. Today I’m going to write about something besides politics. You guys have put in a lot of work during the last six months, and you deserve a break. Maybe you can use the extra time to do some catching up on “Das Kapital.”\nInstead of picking on Democrats, today I want to talk about a recent epiphany I’ve had regarding art.\nConservatives tend to be drawn to things with concrete, practical value, and we usually leave the “artsy-fartsy” stuff for our more liberal friends. But I’ve had a few experiences here at IU that are starting to give me a greater appreciation for, shall we say, the more refined things in life.\nFor example, I really, really like that colorful light-up thing outside the art museum. It’s not much to look at during the day, but if you’re ever on campus at night, it’s definitely worth a walk out of your way to go see it. Next time it snows, you absolutely must bundle up and go watch it for a while. During the most recent snow, I stood there for several minutes just watching the flakes pass through the giant beam of light, as the changing colors reflected off the side of the museum. I thought about all the fossil fuels it must surely take to power the thing, and somewhere, way down deep inside, my little capitalist heart was strangely warmed.\nLast week, my Spanish conversation class took a field trip to the art museum to talk about the paintings en español. I’d been to the IU Art Museum once before and didn’t really get much out of it. But I think that having to talk about the paintings in another language forced me to really look at them in a deeper way than I’ve looked at most art in the past. I really enjoyed our time there.\nFinally, my desk in the IDS newsroom directly faces the desk for the arts section. I always imagined that the type of people who would work for the arts section of newspapers would be the people who spend their days stroking their chins admiring abstract paintings of goodness knows what, and whose best friends are cats. But the IDS arts editors are pretty cool. Some of us even went bowling together this weekend, and one of the arts editors came along, proving that artists do in fact know how to leave the museums and the opera houses to go out and have some fun once in a while – although the arts editor did volunteer to be a designated driver, if that tells you anything.\nI hope you’ve enjoyed this rare opportunity to gaze into the newborn soul of a lover of art. But don’t get used to it, you angry letter writers; next time it’s back to politics.