The first art was created by primitive people, who made pots and plates with primitive decorations. They didn’t realize this was art. They thought it was just pots and plates. Their problem was that seconds after they made a pot or plate, an archaeologist would race up and snatch it and put it in a museum. The primitive people tried all kinds of schemes to protect their pots and plates, including burying them, but the archaeologists would just dig them up. Finally, with nothing to cook in or eat from, the primitive people starved to death and became extinct.

The next big trend in art was painting, which was invented because wealthy people needed something to put on their walls. One famous painter, Michelangelo (first name, Buford), even painted on the ceiling. This was before the discovery of acoustical tiles. In those days, everybody painted the same subject, which was Mother and Child. That was a really popular item. Occasionally, an artist would try something different, such as Mother and Trowel, or Mother and Labrador Retriever, but they never sold.

After the Mother and Child Phase came the Enormous Naked Women Eating Fruit Phase, which was followed by the Just Plain Fruit with No Women of Any Kind Phase and the Famous Kings and Dukes Wearing Silly Outfits Phase. All of these phases were part of the Sharp and Clear School of painting, which means that even though the subjects were boring, they were at least recognizable. The Sharp and Clear School ended with Vincent Van Gogh, who invented the Fuzzy but Still Recognizable School and cut off his ear. This led to the No Longer Recognizable at All School, and finally the Sharp and Clear Again but Mostly Just Rectangles School, which is the school that is popular today, except at shopping malls.

The number one rule of art appreciation is that you never ever bring up the issue of whether or not a particular piece of art is attractive. Let’s say you’re looking at a painting of two large green rectangles. If you say something like, “Those two large green rectangles are very attractive,” people will realize immediately that you do not appreciate art. What you want to say is: “Using the tension created by the contrast in line, shape and tone, offset by the almost deliberately simplistic linearity of hue, the artist subtly, yet inevitably, leads the viewer to a greater awareness of the need for more controls over the acquisition and use of our nation’s mineral resources, particularly zinc.” This particular sentence will work on almost any brand of art except enormous naked women, who obviously have nothing to do with zinc.

Basically, there are two kinds of music: “Classical” music, which is the kind written by dead German guys and played by People wearing tuxedos. “Regular” music, which can be written by anybody and played by anybody and gets on the radio a lot.

If you want to make large sums of money, you should get into regular music. These days classical music is popular with only about three hundred people, the same ones who contribute voluntarily to public television. Classical music tends to go on for days, which is why it is played by “orchestras,” or groups of four hundred fifty to five hundred people whose parents made them practice classical music when all the other kids were out learning how to french-kiss. Orchestra people divide up the labor: one group will play a batch of music or “movement,” then everybody sits back and reads magazines from little magazine stands while the “conductor” consults his notes and decides which musicians will play next. Sometimes the conductor singles out a musician who has been chewing gum or fooling around and forces him or her to play all alone while the other musicians snicker. If you ever have to be in an orchestra, you should try to sit in back, near the guy who plays the triangle. You’ll hardly ever get called on.

Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:

Instruments You Blow into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit out of (tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).

Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).

Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).

Furniture (pianos).

Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars (violins). The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonio Stradivarius, which are prized because they were made with exquisite care and craftsmanship and each one contains just over seventeen ounces of pure heroin in a secret compartment which you open by pressing with your chin.

Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music. The most profitable kind of regular music is rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll comes from the blues, a kind of music developed by American slaves. It is called the “blues” because it is very sad. Evidently the slaves found slavery depressing. Blues lyrics generally go like this:

My woman she done left me

My children left me too

My mule done kicked my kidneys

And my income tax is due

For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people, who were then known as “Negroes.” Black blues musicians played in lowdown bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950s, young white people got interested in the blues. They developed a modified version called “rock ‘n’ roll,” which became enormously popular and turned many of them into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to the black blues musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible, and who continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.

The principal difference between rock ‘n’ roll and classical music is that your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies and no words, whereas your average rock ‘n’ roll song has one melody (sometimes less) and about a dozen words. When rock ‘n’ roll composers are in a hurry to finish songs so they can get to important luncheon dates, they sometimes make up some of the words. Take, for example, the words to the 1960s hit rock ‘n’ roll song “Sittin’ in La La”:

Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya

Uh huh, uh huh

Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya

Uh huh, uh huh

Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for “la la” and “ya ya,” but before he could get around to it somebody released the song and it sold several million records. Another example is “Land of a Thousand Dances,” whose composer evidently got called away to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:

I said aa na aa aa aa Na aa na na na na aa na na na Na na na na

The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country music, which is popular with people who like songs about drunken infidelity but requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents; big-band music, which is popular with people who like big bands but requires big bands; and easy-listening music, which is popular in elevators and supermarkets but can be sung only by groups of heavily sedated suburbanites. You should steer clear of jazz, opera, folk, marching-band and bagpipe music: the market for these is minuscule. You will never see hordes of fans clamoring for the autograph of a bagpiper.