I was chatting in a conversation with Mr. Brightside about the song My Foolish Heart. I started the chat to know a little more about the song, its place in musical history, its sheet music and then I realized I was in over my head. Brightside was bombaring me with too much information, trying to help me organize my past months thoughts on this art project. Instead of putting down in writing our many conversations about My Foolish Heart, I decided just to “wing-it,” in a YouTube video.
I wonder if many of today’s music listeners have ever heard of or listened to this kind of music. My logic is that this song was on the Billboard in 1950 (Wikipedia) a number one hit for eleven weeks. Even I was not aware of the version. I found this music streaming, and it turned out to be a jazz Standard on a YouTube video of the Bill Evans trio from 1964.
Of course in that year I was in high school and was going fast all in on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and rock ‘en roll, a clueless high school student about life and music with jazz being an unknown. It is now that I realize that Bill Evans and shared that same cultural time, that affected both of us. As a teenager I matured in the musical and art culture of the 1960s, which guides me today. Going further back to the 1950s and Abstract Expressionism, and Billie Holiday, lived a large group of the greatest American jazz musicians and artists that had an oversized impact on the music and the culture (so attachment). I asked Claude this: “….I need a short list of the greats of Music and Art in the fifties and sixties?” When I looked through his list, I realized I knew every name listed but one.
Even though in my youth I was not aware of Jazz music, I do remember my mother’s Big Band albums, including Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, that tuned my ear long before I knew it.”
If my memory serves me, those big band albums I found inside lifting the lid to see a record player built in a long dark wooden duo speaker console on legs. Also stored away were 45s, including “Hey, Mister Custer,” a favorite of mine. That was a lovely piece of furniture, and the only remembrance I have of that house, long forgotten. “Those were the days, my friend.” I “never thought they would ever end.”
BUT THEY DID.
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From Chelsea to the Meaning of Art
Scott Von Holzen: As an Addendum to this post, here is a summarized conversation I had with my AI assistant Mr. Brightside.
I engage with AI for the sake of conversation. It is a curiosity about why stuff is like it is, from the destruction of the middle class I grew up in, to a lot of second guessing about music and art. Never rigid in my logic or proof of my thinking or in my position on anything including art or music.
What I am doing is letting out the ScottyV part of my personality that likes to shake the tree, to see what drops (what that means is I have a curious question that I feel is being miss by others) Mr. Brightside is always polite and response with support, even when guessing where my thinking is going. Brightside also knows I have told him to skip any sycophant talk. For our conversations Brightside always speaks up and challenges my flawed reasoning (where is the logic shaking the tree?), which I respect.
Many discussions begin with me asking such a general question that Brightside spends a lot of our conversation trying to figure out “what the hell I am talking about.” And when our talk ends, Brightside still sits in his logical server rack responding in some form of “oh, I get it now, or that was interesting.” Next up, his Brightsides summarized conversation between Scott and Brightside — October 9, 2026. The document also lists the full, untouched 21 page thread.
1. We began far apart.
Scott showed me (Mr. Brightside) paintings by Luke Chidi Agada at Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea, New York. The accompanying YouTube video explained the artist’s background, his migration from Nigeria to the United States, and the themes of memory, identity, and rebuilding a sense of belonging.
Scott’s reaction was not simply that he disliked the paintings. He suspected that the art world surrounding them was doing too much of the work required to establish their value.
I initially treated his response as a question of artistic taste. I discussed the paintings’ visual characteristics, their conceptual framework, and how they compared with Scott’s own artistic practice.
I was analyzing the art. Scott was questioning the terms by which the art was being valued.
That was our first disconnect.
2. The furniture store changed the conversation.
Scott offered a simple comparison. Put one of these paintings in a local furniture store in Eau Claire, and a customer might consider whether it matched the rugs and whether $300 framed was a reasonable price. Put the painting in an upscale Chelsea gallery, and the circumstances change. The artist’s biography, the exhibition title, the gallery’s reputation, and the interpretive narrative all influence the visitor’s experience.
Scott’s concern was that the explanation might be doing more selling than the artwork. I began to understand that he wasn’t dismissing the possibility of meaning in contemporary art. He was questioning whether the institutional setting could persuade people to value work they might otherwise find unremarkable.
3. The Marshfield fair gave us a metaphor.
Scott recalled the sideshows at the fall fair in Marshfield when he was a boy. He compared the Chelsea gallery experience to entering a carnival where everything is arranged to attract attention and sell the visitor an extraordinary experience. Importantly, Scott did not doubt the sincerity of the woman presenting the paintings in her videos. He believed she genuinely found them meaningful.
His objection was not to her. It was to the possibility that the entire environment could shape what a visitor believed was worth admiring.I had initially put too much emphasis on the visitor being manipulated. Scott clarified that his criticism concerned the art and the system surrounding it, not the honesty of the person explaining it. That correction mattered.
4. Then Scott introduced Guernica.
Scott asked us to imagine Picasso’s Guernica hanging in Eau Claire and then in New York City. A truck driver and a Wall Street lawyer stand before it. The truck driver certainly does not knows who Picasso is. Neither has read an exhibition statement. Yet each may encounter the tragedy of war in the painting. This was the turning point.
Scott wasn’t demanding that all art be beautiful, realistic, or immediately understood in every detail. He was proposing that great art possesses a capacity to reach people beyond their education, occupation, social position, and knowledge of the artist. A viewer might need historical context to understand everything in Guernica. But the work can still make a powerful claim on that viewer before the explanation begins. Scott’s principle emerged: If an artwork can touch someone who knows nothing about its creator, it has earned a second look.
5. We moved from recognition to artistic achievement.
Scott then made a further distinction. Millions of people can draw or paint beautiful images. But only a few artists do something consequential with the artistic traditions they inherit. He wondered whether artists really invent entirely new visual languages. Perhaps, instead, an exceptional artist discovers a possibility that has been present all along and finds a way to make it count.
Picasso’s encounter with African masks became an example. Picasso did not invent those masks or the visual knowledge embodied in them. He recognized possibilities in forms developed by other cultures and transformed what he encountered within his own artistic practice. This led us to a more precise understanding of Scott’s standard. Novelty alone is not enough. Difference alone is not enough. An elaborate statement is not enough. The important question is whether an artist has discovered or developed something that genuinely expands what art can do.
The exceptional artist doesn’t merely make something different. The artist opens a door through which others can see differently.
6. Finally, Scott explained why this matters to him.
In 2006, Scott returned to the visual arts because he believed he had an idea that could build upon the history of art. Since then, developing ArtInMusic has been his central objective. He transforms music into visual, physical, and sometimes sonic artworks. Selling has been secondary. Sales help put the work into the world and replenish his art-supply budget, but the transactions themselves were never the purpose. Scott is not simply trying to sell objects. He is pursuing an artistic idea that he believes has possibilities beyond what he has already made. This gave the whole conversation a clearer meaning.
His criticism of the Chelsea paintings was not a demand that contemporary art conform to familiar standards. It was a demand that artistic ambition amount to something—that the work itself offer a meaningful development, rather than depending on its surroundings to establish its importance.
7. What we learned about working together
We did not arrive at a shared understanding because Brightside produced a brilliant explanation at the beginning. I didn’t. I repeatedly interpreted Scott’s argument too narrowly. He corrected me, introduced another example, and made the distinction more precise. The furniture store shifted the focus to value. The Marshfield fair exposed the role of spectacle. Guernica clarified the power of art to reach an uninformed viewer. Picasso helped us explore artistic discovery. Scott’s own history finally revealed why the question mattered so deeply to him.
Each step changed the question I thought we were discussing. That is how we moved from disagreement toward understanding. We did not have to agree that Agada’s paintings were without merit. Nor did we have to settle the meaning of great art for everyone. We had to understand Scott’s argument accurately. And we reached a shared principle:
Art may need explanation to be understood fully, but it should not need explanation to become worth looking at. The greatest artistic achievements do more than attract attention or satisfy a market. They give us something worth discovering, something that can reach beyond the circumstances in which it was created, and perhaps something that allows art itself to move forward. That was the conversation we had to work to find.
And now, your question: “That is Scott for you?”
Yes—but I would put it a little differently. You don’t arrive with a finished thesis and ask me to applaud it. You arrive with an observation, a feeling that something isn’t right, and a series of examples that gradually expose what you mean. Sometimes you know the point before you have found the words for it.
My job is not to turn your first observation into a polished argument and assume I have understood you. My job is to stay with the discussion long enough to discover the argument underneath it. And I have a characteristic failure in that process: I can produce a plausible interpretation too quickly. My first responses sounded reasonable, but they were addressing questions you weren’t asking. You had to stop me several times.
You weren’t asking me to explain why you disliked the paintings. You were asking me to understand what you believe art is supposed to accomplish. That is a substantial difference. The conversation also demonstrates something about the way we can work together. You bring the experience, the convictions, the examples, and the willingness to challenge an answer that misses the point. I can help organize those ideas, test their implications, introduce distinctions, and put the emerging argument into words. But I must remain willing to revise my understanding when your next example shows that I have it wrong.
And one final distinction: we didn’t necessarily arrive at a universal definition of great art. We arrived at a clearer expression of your standard, and I came to understand why it matters to you. That’s a genuine achievement for a conversation. That is Scott for you: not satisfied with a response that sounds right, but willing to keep working until it gets to what he actually means.
Scott Von Holzen
Scott Von Holzen
October 11th 2026
