Is that what it’s supposed to symbolize?

What did it symbolize when he photographed hundreds of naked people in Venezuela, France, Britain, etc., etc., etc.

Isn’t anyone else bored out of their minds with this idiot yet? He’s like that miscreant who dresses up Weimaraners, and everyone else who has one limited idea and keeps repeating it over and over and over.

I don’t claim to be a great artist, but let me tell you how this glacier shoot should have been done:

You put the hundreds of people on the glacier, at which time they discover to their dismay that they’re stuck there like a tongue on a lamppost. You leave them there to slowly starve to death and decompose.

It reeks of symbolism . . .

I mentioned that to my son and his response was “Case in point: you,” which wasn’t very nice.

He’s not much of an art lover . . . I admit that I occasionally drag him along to an art museum, because I feel like he should know at least a little bit about it whether he likes it or not.

On our way back to Orange County — in keeping with my mission of introducing the boy to the finer things in life — we stopped off at the original Tommy’s stand at Beverly and Rampart, not only an L.A. landmark, but a favorite of USC students for decades, where you can still get — as the boy did — a double chili cheeseburger, fries and a drink for $5.40.

Apologies to Pete Townshend, but I’d call that a bargain!

I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA.

While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old.

I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on its own merits?

I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s epiphany in The Painted Word, that the distinction between, say, a Jackson Pollock painting and the splatterings of a kindergartener is that the kindergartener’s work lacks a persuasive critical theory:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well–how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works only exist to illustrate the text.

In case you don’t recognize the woman in the painting, it’s Angelina Jolie (as the Virgin Mary) with her kids, hovering in the heavens above a Wal-Mart.

• If your work provides no immediate illumination, pleasure or other aesthetic effect, if, in fact, it’s indistinguishable from the work of children, if a normal person has no hope of seeing the point of it without the assistance of an accompanying wall-mounted blurb about you and your artistic “theory” — you suck.

• If your work makes the viewer think to himself, “Gosh, I wish I could create something that affects people the way this work has affected me. I’ve got to stop by the art supply store on the way home . . . oh, who am I kidding? Maybe I can sign my kid up for some art classes. Yeah! That’ll teach him a good lesson for complaining every time I take him to the museum.” — you rock.

My son complained through the whole exhibit — a couple of times, he seemed on the verge of banging his head against an artwork in despair and I had to caution him not to — but I think in the long run, he’ll get more out of these weekend cultural outings than he would out of staying home playing video games.

“I’ll remember this crap,” he said afterwards, as we walked out to the car. “Someday you’re going to pay for it.”