For my work Christmas party last year, we were all invited to bring in a picture of ourselves as children doing something seasonal, for a game of match-the-employee-to-the-childhood-photo. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of Santa pictures in the mix. What was unexpected, though, was a strange trend that I noticed – of the Santa pictures on the board, very few showed good, sweet children smiling at the camera from Santa’s lap. Instead, most people brought in a picture of a screaming kid trying to wriggle away from a weary St. Nick.

Why, when a bunch of adults went to their parents and requested a festive picture, did they all turn up with photos of themselves hollering and crying? Did none of us ever take normal pictures with Santa? I don’t think that’s the case. No, it seems that somewhere along the line, either my coworkers or -- more likely -- their parents sorted through a stack of old Santa pictures and deemed that the best ones, the ones worth keeping, were the ones where the tiny versions of their adult children look like complete and absolute brats.

Or, more accurately, I think, they picked the pictures where their kids didn’t look unrealistically perfect. They picked the pictures where their kids looked like themselves, skinned knees, runny noses, temper tantrums, and all. And my coworkers themselves, as adults looking back at pictures of themselves pushing a tired old man in the face, picked those pictures over their other options, too. They all preferred a “bad” Santa picture to a “good” one.

When it comes to painting, do you prefer an image that shows an episode in action or one that presents the individual in a still, concentrated pose? Do you prefer an active scene or a portrait? Regardless of which you prefer, both formats convey stories.

Every painting tells a story. Narrative was injected into Western art with the advent of the technique of perspective that emerged during the late middle ages and was perfected with the Renassaiance masters. Prior to that time, most high art was paid for by religious or noble institutions and focused not on drama and story as with presenting the viewer, usually illiterate peasants, with an ordered philosophical view of the world -- dogmatic non-fiction. However, as the mimetic quality of the artist’s technique improved, the realm of visual arts became more experimental, and artists could expand their work’s narrative potential. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, while officially an altarpiece showing the Armageddon, could very well have been a graphic novel or comic book.

Punk Rock is to music, as Dada is to art. Both genres are duplicated, watered down over time and often misunderstood. Yet when each emerged it was by turning the world on the tip of it's head, it was with a revolution.

When Dada emerged in 1916 it was as anti-art. In the pieces themselves Dada used everyday imagery and any item that one could put in a collage, unless those things were a part of “high art.” Dadaists used images of high art only if they were defacing it. The resulting artwork is chaotic. Anti-art can be anything from political messages achieved in collage or the infamous early Dadist exhibit that displayed a row of urinals and a woman in a a communion dress reciting lewd poetry to patrons. Famous images of Dada art can be found in the works of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp.

As you may have heard, Andy Warhol’s painting “200 One Dollar Bills” sold for $43.8 million at a Sotheby’s auction this week. One of the artist’s first silk-screen paintings, the image went for over three times the amount originally anticipated by the auction house. Those in the art market are hesitantly optimistic: the sale may indicate that the economy’s affect on art sales is on the upswing. Go figure -- a painting of money is the one that has art dealers feeling better about their own bank accounts.

Naturally, pictures of the piece have been featured in most news stories about the sale, and I’ve got to be honest -- I really don’t like it very much. To be really honest, I don’t love most of Warhol’s work. I respect him and I understand why his work is good; I appreciate his  exploration of the glorification of mass consumerism and celebrity. But I just don’t like it. I have never had a desire to visit a Warhol exhibition and I’ve definitely never thought about buying a print of one of his pieces.

This evening, I read a review in the Wall Street Journal of a new collection of Van Gogh’s letters that suggests that the painter wasn’t quite the mad genius legend purports him to be. His genius is of course not up for dispute – it’s the mad part that’s up for debate. Yes, the collection argues, he was mentally ill (he was by his contemporaries dubbed “epileptic,” which at the time was a term used to identify a variety of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder), but his illness wasn’t necessarily tied to the innovation he demonstrated in his work. In fact, the piece says, he didn’t paint or even write during his particularly bad episodes. When his illness was the worst, his creativity disappeared.

That idea surprised me – that Van Gogh’s thickly painted images of flowers and the French countryside might not have been painted in fits of mad passion completely contradicted every idea I had about the artist. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was a little disappointed...but why? Why would the suggestion that he wasn’t gesticulating furiously as he painted, driven only by his obsession to create, disappoint me?