Have you heard of the two kids who accidentally found themselves in a modern art gallery? "Quick," said one, "run! Before they say we made it!" While this may be a hilarious joke, I believe it represents how society feels about modern art. As a popular saying goes “Modern art is produced by incompetents, sold by charlatans and bought by ignorant people!” Why this skepticism towards current art? Why do art historians and renowned scholars set aside new art in favor of Monet or Rembrandt? Is the importance of modern art so infinitesimal as to reduce it to child's play? Or, better yet, is contemporary art worthy enough of being art? Wandering around the Lowe Art Museum, I find myself constantly drawn to the Modern Art section of the museum like a magnet to a refrigerator. More specifically, I am drawn to the piece titled Shattered Illusions. Shattered Illusions is made up of five glass bottles: glass bottles that seemed to have been around for centuries and have undergone extensive use by multiple people. The bottles have a yellow tint symptomatic of aging and hard holes that suggest previous use. Inside each of these medium-sized bottles are figures representing human beings. Each bottle has a different figure; for example, two of the bottles contain what appear to be females and the other three males. Each figure is helplessly tangled in this relentless spiral that juts out from every imaginable direction as if there is no end or hope in sight. The coil wraps around the extremities, middle and neck of the figures, trying to suffocate them. In each bottle the figures struggle with the desire to escape, but not all are freed. The middle bottle has... paper halves... and is mysterious, but as Gladwell states: "It's one thing to recognize the enormous power of snap judgments and thin slices, but it's another to put our faith in something ". so apparently mysterious” (51). Art has no fixed characterization so no one can declare whether something is art or not. Art is left to the perception of the spectator and not to the opinion of the critic; in the quintessence art is indefinable: this is beauty! Works Cited Esaak, Shelley. “What is art?” History of art. About .com. September 29, 2006Read, Herbert. Art now. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1968.Requadt, Water E. “Modern Sculpture: Art or Incompetence?” What is art? 2006. September 29, 2006Richardson, Tony and Nikos Stangos. Concepts of art. New York: Penguin Books, 1974.