Confession time: despite all my words of praise for art and artists and their supporters, it has literally been about a decade since I last set foot in an art gallery (at least that I can remember). But the Bay Area has always been a haven for artists, something one forcefully is reminded of just walking down the street of an average municipality.

Besides, this time I had an excuse. Some works by one of my favorite artists, M. C. Escher, were on display at the San Jose Museum of Art, so Denise and I grabbed our public library cards (good for two bucks off the entry fee) and went off to broaden our minds.

The Escher display was wonderful; I saw some works I had not seen before and learned a bit about Escher’s life and his life as an artist. But there were some other displays that we took in while we were there; a showing of Op Art pieces, abstract works drawn in ballpoint pen by Il Lee, some amazing collages by Jess, and an exhibit of a piece called “Listening Post” by sound artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen. This is an array of 231 small displays that presents real-time traffic from Internet chat rooms and other parts of cyberspace according to different sorting criteria and displayed in various ways. The result is charming, randomly witty, goofy, and quite irresistable. Think of putting your ear to the wall and listening to a whole world on the other side.

It’s hard to describe the effect that this visit to the gallery had on me. I have long believed that maintaining a healthy mind required exposure to interesting and fresh ideas. I can’t tell you exactly what great new ideas I was exposed to on this little field trip, but I came out of the gallery with the delightful feeling that my brain had just been given a gentle massage, softly squeezing deadness and fatigue out of it. I felt fresh, able to step away from the intellectual ruts we all fall into, ready to consider old problems in new ways.

I found that I was interacting with the art on two levels. I get the impression that one common criticism of abstract art is that it involves some technical changes in materials or technique, which makes many people consider it as “gimmicky”. Perhaps so, but I found myself intrigued by how this stuff was done, particularly the Op Art works. But in spite of the attraction to my inner nerd, I found that much of this stuff really is quite striking. It falls pleasantly on the eye and works its way though you, warping your mind in subtle ways–and that is a good thing.

My day job is moving to new quarters, and will put me closer to this gallery and other museums in downtown San Jose. I plan to make use of them. I also realize now that no one can really call themselves educated unless they have at least some exposure to enjoying and–better still–making art.