Professor H. told his class that art was not useful. If it has any practical use, if it has any use-value whatsoever, then it isn't art. The example he liked to give was of an artist who made a chair out of meringue. "Nobody needs art," he said waiting for the idea to sink in. What could someone do with a chair made of meringue? Fragile. Delicious. It is the opposite of everything a chair should be. Unless someone tried to eat it, the chair would remain art its whole life.
     So passionate, so unshakable was his faith in this single proposition that it was difficult not to imagine him seated in that very chair, alone, at home, in the middle of his living room -- drinking brandy and listening to jazz rather than grading his students' papers. And all the while, the chair would bear his rather considerable weight without crumbling as if for as long as he could maintain a certain "useless" frame of mind, he too was in essence, superfluous and could co-exist in the same space as the art of the chair.


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