The Art Detector

Miriam walked around her studio waving the strange, hand held electrical device and waiting for a bleep.
She waved it over a watercolour landscape of her garden.
She waved it over an oil painting of her cat.
She waved it over a sombre portrait she had painted of her mother not long before she had died of cancer; surely that would set the device off, it had so much genuine feeling in it.
But no, the art detector was silent. Her truthful, heartfelt painting of her mother was not art.
She let out a heavy sigh.
"What is art anyway?", she wondered.
Unless a piece made the art detector bleep it wouldn't be considered art and she had to produce something that was art otherwise all her years spent at art school would be wasted and all her dreams of a career as an artist poured down the drain.
"And I don't want to spend my whole life stuck in some soulless, unfulfilling office job", she thought, "I'm trained to be an artist. Isn't that what I should be doing?".
So many of the friends she had had at art school were doing dismal jobs that had nothing to do with creating anything.
They'd swam like little salmon all the way up stream and leapt up the waterfall just to find out that industry had polluted the spawning grounds.
And it wasn't money or being famous they cared about; it was doing a job that let them use their skills. She didn't know any of them who wouldn't have given up some high powered executive type job to do something low paying as long as it allowed them to create.
Also it would mean an end to all the horrifying dreams she had been having; dreams of dancing out of a ballet school only to have her plaster of paris legs shattered with a sledgehammer or of learning to play the piano only to have the lid slammed down so hard on her fingers that it sliced them all off.
"There are millions of people in the human race", her mother had said, "You can't expect them all to win it. Honestly, I don't know where you got all these big dreams from, from watching TV, I expect. I always taught you that it didn't matter whether you were a plumber or a factory worker or a housewife as long as you're doing something useful".
"Why didn't mother ever support my dreams?", thought Miriam, "She always wanted me to be pesimistic and pragmatic, like she always expected me to fail".
Just then, however, the art detector started to beep.
Snapping out of her day dream, Miriam became excited.
"What is it?", she thought, "What have I created thats art?".
But then, looking down, she realised that she was holding the art detector over her rubbish bin.
"Thats it", she said, angrilly, to the detector, "Thats what you think is art?".
She reflected for a moment on the idea of selling the rubbish bin.
Perhaps it could be a stepping stone; a way of making a name so that she could sell her paintings.
"No", she said, finally, shaking her head and dumping the art detector in the bin, "I don't care what the art machine says. Its not art to me".
She walked over to the painting of her mother, looked at it and smiled.
"Perhaps I will become a plumber after all", she said.