There’s a good case to be made for the notion that “art” saved my life, or, at the very least, gave me a reason to keep going through the rough patches. Let’s just say that for a kid who’d spent his high school career drawing elaborate doodles in the margins of algebra and Latin textbooks whilst flunking exams on those very subjects, the discovery of something called “art school” was a beacon of hope shining across the dark and forbidding landscape of post-secondary education.

When, halfway through my senior year, my art teacher first told me about art school, the idea sounded so preposterous I figured she had to be making the whole thing up. Apparently not, and eventually her unbridled enthusiasm for the institution had me thinking maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth.

The way she explained “art school” (even the name struck me as a total oxymoron), it was a place where students were actively encouraged to sit around all day drawing pictures. Apparently this sort of activity went on nonstop for weeks or even months at a stretch.

At one point she located a flier from the Portland School of Fine and Applied Arts featuring numerous photos of long-haired kids like me drawing, painting and sculpting up a storm. I couldn’t help noticing that none of the photos revealed anything remotely resembling a school textbook.

No algebra books, I thought, What the heck are they using for drawing paper? Then it hit me. “Are there any math courses?” I queried. “Certainly not!” she replied. My next question was easy: "Where do I sign up?"

At art school I discovered that doodling in textbooks was only the first step of my journey into a vast, vibrant, new world, awash in color, form and provocative ideas; a rich, challenging, eclectic environment, inhabited by quirky creative individuals who were constantly searching out new materials, methods and forms of artistic expression.

One of these new (to me, anyway) forms was something called “conceptual” art, a term which included, but was not limited to, things like “art installations” which often involved taking the mundane, familiar props of everyday life and placing them (actually that would be “juxtaposing” in “art speak”) alongside other disparate elements, generally in a startling and/or unexpected setting. The sole purpose was to evoke a strong emotional response from viewers.

On a recent trip to Brooklyn’s super arty, hipster-centric Williamsburg, my family and I had a chance to visit a hot new “art installation” making its brief, dramatic appearance on the site of the abandoned, soon-to-be-razed for luxury condos Domino Sugar Factory.

The piece featured a massive sculpture of an Afro-Caribbean woman, crafted from 40 tons of sugar. Crouching sphinx-like among the soaring girders of the abandoned building’s cavernous interior, she clearly evoked “a strong emotional response.”

It’s significant that absolutely no attempt was made to “explain” the “meaning” of the piece. This was a classic example of “beauty” (or whatever else you might take away from the experience) being strictly in “the eye of the beholder.”

Given this lack of explanatory plaques or signage of any kind, everyone more or less wandered around inside the huge, empty, industrial interior of the building, forming and re-forming into various queues, patiently waiting our turn to get a close-up view of some fascinating artistic detail.

At one point, my wife and I joined a queue, which was headed in a different direction from all the others. In fact we probably picked that particular line precisely because it was headed away from the sculpture itself and toward the opposite wall of the building. Oh, I thought to myself, There must be some subtle element of the installation over there.

As we approached the end of the line, I realized that whatever we’d been waiting to see was apparently located outside the building. At the end of line we’d get to peek through a jagged hole in the metal siding.

What visual treat has the artist got in store for us? I wondered. When I finally reached the hole I saw ... hmmm. What did I see, exactly? Gazing across the East River, I glimpsed a random stretch of lower Manhattan. Just as I was starting to ponder the deep meaning of this aspect of the artist’s vision a staff member walked past and announced, “That’s just a hole in the wall. It has absolutely nothing to do with the exhibit.”

Oddly enough, even though everyone in the line had heard the announcement, nobody chose to drop out. Which just proves the old axiom, when it comes to art, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.