Dr. Hill shared some of the hardships and lessons of life he has experienced, leaving us to reflect on our own lives and to draw connections and an understanding of why we are where we are currently. As a student studying art and who wants to pursue some form of fine arts professionally, I think this is a fundamental question that is inherent in the art practice—why do artists do what they do? I say inherent because art making challenges you to constantly create, but it is not so much out of the need for expression as it is for the form of communication. Art as expression vs. communication are different types of work that function in separate ways. The former is a self-centered, one-sided argument for making art that speaks at you, the viewer, the latter is an empathetic, open-ended, question-driven work that wants to open up a dialogue about itself as a form of mediation between maker and viewer; the former is work one makes for himself, the latter is work one makes for others. I think here is where art really exists in the public space—to create a form of empathy, but in that empathy there is also an innate form of humor that transcends pretentious artist statements/writings on the work (where words oftentimes attempt to substitute for the piece itself) and undermine the somewhat institutional seriousness of art, which Western art history so often perpetuates when it places masterworks on a pedestal, building a hierarchy where images are compared rather than in conversation with one another. Pop Art is brilliant in that way because it subverts that whole culture, poking fun at itself. The object in this case approximates an early comedy film from the 1930s. Take Charlie Chaplin for example. Baudrillard described two types of humor: one is based on inverting social/structural paradigms (Chaplin cross-dressing), and the other is defying the laws of physics (when Chaplin maintains stasis climbing down an upward-running escalator). When the art object becomes aware of what it is doing and how it goes about doing what it does; when it understands that it stands-in for a person as a form of empathy, there is something funny in that as well as something tragic. For art to belong in a space where it both interjects and remains self-contained is to realize that the artist is constantly in the pursuit to understand others out of an inability to fully understand him or herself.