The art in my office is terrible. I'm looking at a piece right now, and it's like a festival of mediocrity. It's all geometric shapes and muted colors, with bold stripes and wavy lines on the side to give it a sense of texture. It's the kind of design you might have seen on the $5 sweatshirt rack in the 80s. The one behind me is no better. More reds, maybe, and a hint of gold, with lots of intersecting half-circles. It reminds me just enough of a Chagall to piss me off.

This all leads me to believe that there was a challenge like the one in which Ghiberti and Brunelleschi competed to design the baptistry door in Florence, except that the prize of this contest was to populate every wall in every office building in America with abstract crap in identical frames. (This is not a derogatory statement about abstract art—I'd die of happiness if a Jackson Pollock or a Mondrian appeared on the wall outside my office—it's merely that the abstract paintings purchased by offices across the country are listless and completely devoid of energy. They are quiet, almost nihilist art, and it's as if they are saying that our passions and dreams and individual personalities don't matter a lick. And to your average corporation, of course, they don't.)

One thing I've discovered is that the higher profile a company is, the better the art will be. Likewise for the salaries. The executive floors and offices are chock full of delightful art and sculptures, because those at the executive level are encouraged to think creatively. But the cubie farms where most of us spend our days are littered with the most generic artistic backwash imaginable. We'd do better hiring graffiti artists to decorate our offices. At least there would be a sense of motion, of things being alive. It's as if The Powers That Be think that being faced with a Van Gogh while collating our meeting minutes will cause us to have some kind of magnificent breakdown. We'll begin to weep uncontrollably at the pathetic state of our lives, quit our jobs, and wander across the country Kerouac-style, hitching rides on box cars and learning to play the banjo. For some of us, that's exactly what would happen.

The only explanation for the pablum on the walls is that they don't really want you to look at it. It's supposed to be background stimuli to appease the right side of our brains and keep the environs from seeming too institutional, while at the same time not occupying too much of the left side that needs to stay focused on this year's ad revenues. Art is challenging, you see, and people who accept the challenge are hard to keep docile.

Am I being too conspiratorial to suggest that bad art is a tool of oppression for the majority of office workers today? That it is used to keep us in our place and numb our brains so that we don't start thinking we deserve better things? Take a look around, and see what you think. As Paul Gauguin said, "art is either plagiarism or revolution." Make mine revolution!