Our family spent this Sunday at The Modern. It was the kids’ first time to go to an art museum, though we’ve gone to our local science and history museum several times. Annette and I had been talking about going this weekend by ourselves but decided there was no reason for the whole family not to go instead.

Art is seen as something that one needs an extensive education—or at least good breeding—to appreciate. The learning curve apparently presented by the self-referential and perceived-to-be-insular nature of so much twentieth-century art is partially to blame; a media-soaked culture that teaches art appreciation primarily as a college class for liberal arts majors doesn’t help.

Recently, I had an epiphany: that modern art’s level of approachability is exactly opposite from how it is popularly perceived. Though it’s thought of by many as the least accessible of artistic movements, modernism is in fact among the most accessible, the most democratic. Duchamp claimed the primacy of the artist by hanging a urinal in a museum and calling it art—art because he, an artist, said it was. By contextualizing the profane into art’s “sacred” world, he forced viewers to look at this everyday object in other-than-everday ways. This is also a claim of the authoritativeness of the viewer: Duchamp didn’t show us a particular aspect of the object or his interpretation and impression of it, he showed us his work in a way that lets us legitimately apply our own perceptions and feelings to it. Yes, it’s art about art—a fantastic starting point to explore art on other themes.

Most people look at abstract expressionism for the first time as teenagers or adults and are frightened by the lack of form, the lack of something recognizable to study and appraise on its literal resemblance to our visual perceptions. Primitivist works which recall humanity at its most artistically unsophisticated seem scary to someone who feels that they immediately need to be getting “something more” from viewing it than their inevitable reaction, borne from the realist nature of the recorded media forms with which they’re most familiar: “that looks like something a child could do.”

I dislike (and distrust) listen-to-the-children-for-they-are-pure-and-true stories at least as much as the next person, but there’s some truth to it this time. Six-year old Julie had as valid opinions about many of the works at The Modern as Annette and I did; there were pieces about which she showed me more than I showed her.

It’s never occurred to her that art is something to be made and enjoyed only by people who are knowledgeable about art. Drawing colors and forms, then considering her emotions about her work and what she sees in it aren’t things a child has to learn, they’re things she would have to unlearn.

Admission to The Modern is free of charge on Wednesdays and the first Sunday of each month.