
The author poses with Michael Heizer’s sculpture Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: Emily Lytle-Painter
How many times have we overheard visitors looking at Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel or an Abstract Expressionist work for the first time wonder aloud, “But why is this art? How did this make it into a museum?” (And, let’s be honest, how many times have we seen a new piece and silently asked ourselves the exact same thing?)