Harmontown Episode 72: On the Nature of Art 

I love the Harmontown podcast for a lot of reasons. It's consistently funny, goofy, and offensive. And, very often, it'll hit these little moments of humanity where you realize that everyone, from a Hollywood writer to someone who considers themselves the loneliest outcast in society, is the same on some level.

There's this unbelievably remarkable sequence about art, how it makes you feel emotionally and physically, which segues into a bit about crying at the launching of the Space Shuttle and when it's appropriate to applaud, jumping back and forth between art and what it means to be paid for art. It's really just this enlightening, uplifting, beautiful conversation.

I don't know that I can do it justice. When you hear people talking about how daunting it is to create (whether it be words, pictures, or music) when you walk into a museum and see the amazing work done by people like Van Gogh or Da Vinci—until you realize that you're seeing only their best work. Or when it is pointed out that Michelangelo had a number of unfinished sculptures after David, because people stopped paying him. They stopped paying Michelangelo.

It's just a brilliant, unscripted sequence that may be one of my favorite things I've heard or seen this year.

And then it's followed up by some Dungeons and Dragons.

Such is life in Harmontown.

Listen starting around 1 hour in (it's almost exactly 1 hour in) until about 1 hour and 40 minutes.