I’m not entirely sure why.
But this strikes me as funny.
And illuminating.
It appears that researchers at Boston College have ended a modern era dispute.
Have you ever glanced skeptically at abstract art and thought:
“Are you serious? My kid could have done that!”
Say, like a drip painting by Jackson Pollock?
If you have… you were wrong.
Here’s why.
In the study children were presented with unlabelled abstract art, like Pollock’s.
Paired with similar artwork by children (and monkeys and elephants).
It turns out that “even 4-7-year-olds can distinguish works by artists.”
Now here’s the funny, and interesting part.
The children preferred the children’s artwork.
Their aesthetic preferences, their feelings, seem to be self-reflective.
Even though their qualitative assessment, their thinking, leaned towards the artists.
In an August 1949 article, LIFE magazine asked readers about Jackson Pollock:
“Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”
Over 500 letters to the editor passionately concurred.
“No… he is not!”
But the few who did like his paintings were crazy about them.
They felt his mad genius.
And today a painting from Pollock’s drip period can fetch north of $100 million.
What’s the lesson?
It’s simple, really.
Your bold creation is probably going to connect with a passionate few.
People who see what you see, and feel what you feel.
But maybe… just maybe…
By connecting deeply with the feelings of those few.
You’ll end up connecting deeply with the thinking of the many.
And that’s when things really get interesting.

Have you heard of the Sokal hoax?
Twenty years ago a physicist wrote an article “liberally salted with nonsense.”
The paper argued that quantum gravity was a social construct.
He then submitted it to a scholarly journal for publication.
He wanted to test his assumption that they’d publish it, if:

a. It sounded good; and
b. It flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.

Guess what?
The academic journal, Social Text, published it.
Because if something sounds right and feels right, then it must be right.
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view classically:
“What I feel to be good—is good. What I feel to be bad—is bad.”
Donald Trump is following the same playbook.
His speeches are liberally salted with nonsense.
But they sound right and feel right to a lot of people.
They sound right because he’s speaking their language.
Plainspoken, unscripted, and imperfect.
And they feel right because he’s pandering to their beliefs.
Calming their fears and stoking their desires and identities.
Their “ideological preconceptions.”
In 1996, Dr. Alan Sokal wrote and submitted his paper with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
Social Text’s intellectual laziness caused them to receive the brunt of Sokal’s joke.
If Donald Trump is doing the same thing in 2016.
And if we allow him to win.
The joke may be on all of us.