A good rule of thumb for judging art is to gauge the reaction that it gets in two different communities. If the art hits close to home for, say, people in Israel and in Kansas, then it's done its job. We devised this rule of thumb after observing reactions to Israeli-born New York artist Michal Rovner's work. Rovner took photographs of simple things like birds and made reproductions of reproductions until all that remained were basic forms, which she then infused with color to give the forms a hazy, dreamlike feel. Rovner related her photographic process to the process of immigration, which forced her to abandon her attachments to concrete details and carry only universal truths. How do we know her project worked? Because Midwesterners assumed that photographs of soldiers riding tanks on the Israeli border actually depicted tractors in a field. Rovner managed to capture the essence of forms without telling her viewers what to see.
