I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a connoisseur of great art. I know the names of a few painters and even which eras they painted in, but I don’t know very much about art in general. If you need the names of Alexis's husbands on Dynasty, I'm your guy. However, if you need someone to tell you about Vermeer's influences or the difference between a Renoir and a Degas, well, you'll need to look somewhere else.

That's not to say I don’t enjoy art, because I do. But, I've never really taken the time to study it, to become versed. I don’t think I have really been to an art museum until this weekend. Most of my knowledge of art comes from one source: Sister Wendy Beckett.

I love Sister Wendy. I think she may be the most beautiful person on the planet. Here is a woman who has dedicated her life to God and, to fulfill that dedication, has taken up a quest to learn and teach the world about great art. The sight of her tiny, habit-clad frame stalking through grand museums is at once comic and deeply inspiring.

Anytime one of Sister Wendy's specials is on TV, I watch it. I love hearing her opinions and the odd bits of humor she lets forth. She never condescends to her audience, but instead invites them into her world and enlightens them. And every once in a while, she lets forth with a statement like, "Her head hair is not so convincing, but her pubic hair is lovely and fluffy." During my, shall we say, adventurous college years, I devised an entire theory of life based on that very statement. The thesis was that the state of being "fluffy" was the closest to the divine we can achieve on Earth. What can I say, they grow some good shit in Bellingham.

So, this week I set out to tour the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I'd been meaning to visit for years, especially since I have a friend who works there and could get free parking. But I had put it off until now. Dcow had to visit a museum for a paper at school, so I agreed to accompany him (and get him in free.) Neither of us are particularly knowledgeable about art, or really very serious people to begin with. There was really no way to avoid our instincts to snark on everything we see, so we decided to just go with it. And to try to use as many big words as possible in the process. I pledged to use the word jejune at least once during the tour.

The Getty is a huge place. It sits on a hill above the 405 freeway, taunting the traffic with its gleaming marble and intellectual prowess. The trip to the museum begins with a 5 minute tram ride up the hill. This is a slow, contemplative tram. It's a tram that believes the journey is more important than the destination. This would be great if the view outside of the tram was painted by a Great Master. But Michaelangelo never saw the beauty in an 8-lane freeway or Sepulveda Boulevard.

Once we disembarked from the tram, we were greeted by a giant sculpture which resembles a giant jai alai mitt. Since I went to a University where large, inexplicable sculptures were the norm, I didn’t spend too much time contemplating it. At least it didn’t look like Ziggy having sex with a cougar, like the sculpture outside the administration building at school. Dcow was a little more baffled by it.

After a lunch consisting of a roast beef and bleu cheese sandwich (so I could feel cultured from the start) we started off on a tour. The Getty's collection is both diverse and specialized. They have a lot of ancient art and sculpture, a large exhibition of 17th Century home décor, photographs and paintings. Many, many paintings.

We started in the Dorothea Lange exhibit, which I wanted to see since my friend Dana did a lot of work mounting and preserving the photos. The pictures were beautiful, if harrowing. But the gallery was too crowded and the pathos too real for any real snarking. We got bored rather quickly.

The rest of the collection on display consisted mainly of three things: Gold leaf, inlay and nipples. Many, many nipples. Venus seems to be the Renaissance version of Cindy Margolis. She's everywhere and most always naked. She also seemed to have a rather inappropriate relationship with Mars who, if I'm not mistaken, was her brother. A couple of collagen injections and she's Angelina Jolie on a clamshell.

The decorative arts exhibit was rather fascinating. The main features of this exhibit are four reconstructed complete rooms from 17th Century France and Germany. As Dcow said to me, the designers of the time made gold leaf their personal bitch. Some of the inlay work was amazing, replicating complete scenes simply with different shades of lacquered wood. The craziest thing was a canopy bed which Liberace would have deemed too showy. There was a canopy within the canopy and pleats everywhere.

Of the paintings, the one the struck me the most was Van Gogh's "Irises". Van Gogh was the first artist I was introduced to, by my paternal Grandmother. There's something about his work that gets me. The boldness of the color and the way the paint strokes give an almost three-dimensional appearance. I could have stared at it for hours.

I didn't, though. We moved through most of the place at a good clip, trying to see everything and stopping only when we had a particularly good joke. Part of me feels guilty about that. Part of me feels like it was anti-intellectual to stare at a Titian depicting the Goddess of Love and decide that baby got back. But, hey, I was there. I was looking at a Titian and I was having a reaction. It wasn't the one that Sister Wendy might have. It wasn't the one George Plimpton would have. But it was a reaction, and I think that's the point.

Art should be more important to me, I guess. I think I'm afraid that if I say something like "I'm a sucker for Dutch Realism" then people will stare at me. Or the kids on the playground will beat me up. But, the truth is, I am a sucker for Dutch Realism. My favorite painting is "The Betrothal of the Arnolfini" by Jan van Eyck. And right there I feel like a giant nerd. Well, I am a giant nerd. There, I've said it.

Still, I never found a way to use jejune as I had promised. I did use the phrase bas-relief later in the day, though.

I'm going to go back to the Getty. And I'm going to get myself to the other great museums in this town. And I'm just going to accept that I'm a nerd -- and Venus was a whore. A big one.