My friend asked if I thought graffiti can be beaux art—high art. I know what the question means, but that doesn’t save it from being meaningless. Art is a name that we have given to a certain category of human endeavor that we imagine to be lifted up out of and somehow suspended above our daily experience. Art is important and timeless and ought to be preserved in marble buildings so that countless generations will henceforth be enlightened and elevated by it. And when I see Whistler’s Symphony in White, No.1 hanging majestically in the National Gallery, I am tempted to believe it.

But the terminology confuses. I wrote the sentence passively on purposes. The idea of art simply confuses. So if I am out riding a rented bike along the Donaukanal and I am arrested and moved and delighted and captivated and wowed and annoyed by what people have put there, by the excretions of their creative energies, exerted for whatever reason moved them, why should I have to worry myself about high art or low art or beaux art or any of it? I will take what they have done, and leave the word art to those who lack the confidence to simply feel their feelings.