All screengrabs from Michael Bell-Smith’s “Art Tape: Live With / Think About” Karen Archey

Michael Bell-Smith’s hilarious yet sharp “Art Tape: Live With / Think About” has made heavy rounds on the internet this past week, and for good reason. The amusing video splices together footage from various pop television shows and movies in which characters come head-to-head with modernist or contemporary art, with variously quizzical or opinionated reactions. In an episode of Law & Order CI, Detective Robert Goren (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) waxes philosophical on the function of art to his partner Detective Alex Eames (Kathryn Erbe), preferring the thought-provoking Lucien Freud over the polite Impressionist canvases of Monet. Set to the Talking Heads’ “This Must be the Place (Naïve Melody),” the video progresses to the museum scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which finds Bueller and friends engrossed with various modernist masterpieces, namely a few Picassos. Bell-Smith digitally doodles over the video in tune with the Talking Heads track, while a young David Byrne whizzes through the video plane in an animated picture frame. The track lyrics, “Home is where I want to be…Pick me up and turn me round… Never for money, Always for love… Cover up say goodnight” could be read as a romantic, idealist swooning over one’s relationship to producing, selling, and living with art.

While “Live With / Think About” may initially seem funny at the expense at others’ ignorance to some (i.e. we find ironic humor in the simplistic desire of Detective Eames to throw a Monet up in her house because it’s nice to look at, and the posturing rejoinder of Goren that there’s more to art than wallpaper), arguably the video reaches far beyond wry amusement with pop culture. Bell-Smith effectively explicates the colossal divide between the production of modern and contemporary art (which often takes popular culture as fodder) and the popular reception of modern and contemporary art as illustrated by mainstream media. Bell-Smith’s “Live With / Think About” brings to mind the paradoxical functionality of contemporary art: if a major tenet of art is to promote or enact social change within society at large, how is this possible for art as we know it today if its basic understanding is entrenched in bourgeois education and extremely distanced from the world in general? While the answer remains to be seen, it’s refreshing to see such concerns brought forth in an art world context.