Calvin and Hobbes

You can never have too much Calvin and Hobbes. Let's take a look at a couple of strips.


This raises an interesting question. Do we have to like art if we're going to look at it? Calvin is trying to create a sort of Emperor's New Clothes situation here, where he will create art that no one understands or particularly likes, but they will pretend to like it and understand it in order to avoid being classified as "the lowbrows who can't appreciate great art like this."

If it's okay to not like art and still appreciate it, or rather, to not find it aesthetically pleasing, maybe that means that great art shouldn't fit society's definition of beauty at all. Maybe the greatest kind of art is the kind we can't understand and don't think is particularly pretty.

Still, the question remains, would you pay to see a deformed snowman in an art gallery setting?


Alright, one more.


So here's something that's very different from anything Calvin has ever made, because Calvin doesn't want to do what everyone else does. But when he gets tired of not conforming, he finds a new way to be avant-garde: be ironic by giving the public exactly what they want while simultaneously making them think they don't want it and therefore, they will want to want it. If Calvin gives them a nostalgic image in a modern setting, his theory is that his audience will love it, either because they're nostalgic themselves or because they believe nostalgia is avant-garde.