Throughout the ages, art has been tailored for the creative minds of intellectuals, political and social nonconformists and social insiders. From the stoic, solid art of the Greeks to the abstract, mind-opening painting of the … never mind. If you wanted to hear this, you’d have signed up for an art history class.

And for all of you who are squirming in your seats, today’s Ritalin Renoirs are changing the definition of popular art for you.

Motion has always been central to art. There have been entire genres of art based on it. Ever since some chimp wrote “Coco was here” on a tree, the idea of time has been central to art.

Today, we dump all pretense of solidness and go for complete motion.

A man known to some as the greatest artist of the Pepsi generation is best known for his abstract video series, “Cremaster.”

According to the March 3 issue of Time magazine, the Guggenheim Museum (for those of you who don’t speak New York-ian, that means “Big-ass Museum”) is hosting quite an exhibition of Matthew Barney’s work. He does plenty of off-the-wall sculpture, but Barney is still best known for his “Cremaster” campaign, according to the magazine.

We wouldn’t know firsthand, of course — it would take too much time for someone of our generation to check his work out.

Have you seen that Red Hot Chili Peppers’ video for “Can’t Stop?” The band credits a man by the name of Edmund Wurm for the inspiration of his “one- minute” art. The group does everything from constructing giant walls that fit perfectly around the figure of singer Anthony Kiedis, to letting three John Fruciantes dance in trash cans, to sticking art supplies in every hole in bassist Flea’s head.

That’s all spontaneous — sort of. The argument can be made that using the human body as art is unique, but every form of art before today has used the body in that way — be it as a model, an inspiration or a voice.

The Peppers are in no way in the wrong, though. They don’t show money, objectify women or end the video in “to be continued … .” It’s actually a pretty cool video. Using gallery art in addition to music, theater or another medium is fine. It’s just more rare to find a pure form of spontaneous art for art’s sake that matches up to a Picasso.

But there are exceptions. One machine is in touch with the thoughts of an entire English-speaking world. The “Listening Post” has been on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art, not for its looks but for its insight.

According to Adam Gopnick’s March 3 article in the New Yorker, the machine takes in phrases from chat rooms all over the world and displays them on hundreds of screens or reads them out loud. If this isn’t art for the attention-deficit-disordered mind, nothing is.

And, not surprisingly, the thoughts of the English-speaking world focused on duct tape, the color orange and sex. Gopnick actually found the poems often took form, one of which started with “WARNING: CODE ORANGE,” hit mid-stride at “President PlasticWrap,” and ended with “duct tape and lingerie.”

If that’s not modern art, I don’t know what is — It sits in a museum, spews poetry, and has lots of shiny screens to look at.

Still, call it artistic, call it spontaneous, call it what you will — I think most of this “spontaneous” art is just a good excuse to stick markers up Flea’s nose.

Jeff Mitchell is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.