At a video/performance show for the art school’s MFA students, one artist chatted with a plywood box for 20 minutes, and then sat down next to it and drank a juice box. Then a girl danced awkwardly with a cloth-covered phallus/boom-box-on-wheels.

Next thing I knew I was at the Yale undergraduate art exhibit, staring at a chocolate-topped café table. The artist claimed that he wanted to “confront the interface of edible and inedible objects.” He rambled on about how “it is fascinating that you can have a piece of chicken, and a book, and a cell phone, and gold (as in jewelry), all on a table together in the same space,” and “what would it be like if they melted into the plane?” I could not for the life of me understand anything that came out of his mouth, but he used the term “interface” in rare abundance.

Another young artist spent months using two scanners to “scan each other,” in the creation of seductive digital images that she makes into sleek little books and large reflective glass-plated prints. I am obsessed by her “Scan Scan” project and hope to become her agent.

It mystifies me how the art world can induce such pretensions, such idiocy, and such brilliance, all in the space of 24 hours. But it’s never hard to know if it’s the chocolate, the phallus, or the scanner that emits beauty.

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