Dubbs let us sleep in this morning before we headed out around 9:45 for breakfast at a diner. After that, we headed back into downtown Asheville, to go to the Asheville Art Museum, which is a small but pretty museum. It has four floors and a rooftop cafe area that has decent views of the mountains.

The museum mostly focused on the twentieth century, and featured regional artists. One section was dedicated to self-taught artists of varying quality, which I found interesting. Usually museums I have been to feature top-notch work from unusually talented self-taught artists, but some of the work here was what ordinary people who were dedicated could produce. The museum still treated that art seriously, which was refreshing to see.

I enjoyed the museum very much, but can’t describe too many of the works – being modern, many were abstract. One that I do remember was one for which an artist fed flies sugar water with dye in it and let the flies poop on a canvas. It was actually an interesting piece, but I’m not sure how much credit the artist gets in that work (except as maybe “found” art?). Ewwwwww.

The museum also had a painting by Zelda Fitzgerald, who was married to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was quite good – it looks to me that she had talent and some training.

After our high-brow encounter with art, we swung by a chocolate store and then Ben and Jerry’s for “lunch,” and proceeded back to the Pinball Museum, where we successfully got into the building today. It was a fun couple of hours, although I did verify my long-held feeling that I am much better at video games than I am at pinball. I stank it up at pinball today. Mer had some good rounds of pinball and played some video games, including Burger Time, which she loved as a preteen on an Intellivision gaming system that her grandparents had for the grandchildren. I was most successful at playing the original Star Wars game. That was a good time. Dubbs floated around both pinball and video games, seeming to do well at both.

We were about a block away from the Basilica of St. Lawrence, which we wanted to tour. Unfortunately for us, the basilica was closed today, except for the mass schedule, because of Christmas week. So we’ll have to check that out next time.

We headed back to the car after a detour through a small art “mall,” where many styles of art were for sale. I loved the stained glass, but there were interesting pieces in decorative metal, photography, paint, and more. Once back at the car, we went home so Dubbs could grab a nap before supper.

Supper was at a barbeque place in Biltmore Village, around 7:00. Biltmore Village is the small village next to the Biltmore estate, and is now mostly a shopping area. We strolled around the streets looking at the Christmas lights, and even detoured into a Christmas shop that was open. Afterwards, we headed home for the evening.

So we covered modern high art, modern video game art, and consumer art. I guess we artfully dodged about today. Asheville continues to be a fun place to be, and the weather was beautiful again. Here is to tomorrow and the plans I have to make tonight!