The speaker was a petite, intense-looking Hispanic woman accompanied by her son. I could be wrong, but she did not seem like a regular museumgoer. The setting was the exhibition currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM): "1934: A New Deal for Artists," containing 56 paintings created under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). And the subject was an appealing work by Morris Kantor, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, entitled Baseball at Night.

To the average art snob, such comments are of no consequence, because they reflect what ordinary people do when confronted with works of art: they look at the subject matter, not the art. From this perspective, Kantor's painting could just as well have been a magazine illustration; that woman would still have remarked to her son, "We used to see games like that in Denver."

In America, this art-snob perspective reached a zenith of sorts in 1939, when the critic Clement Greenberg published "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," a famous essay positing two ways of looking at art: the "cultivated" way, which focuses on the formal attributes of a work and fits them into an unfolding historical process; and the "naïve" way, which simply reacts to the scene or personage being portrayed.