Here is the latest of the art world by famed LA News writer John Doie:

" IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A HIGHLIGHT in the season of important art events, shading some light on the state of affairs. It was the opening in a string of similarly promoted sensational shows of our artistic colleagues from the primate world, mainly chimpanzees. Announced as a seminal breakthrough comparable only to occurrences like Picasso's "Desmoiselles" or Pollock's dripping paintings, expectations ran high even for someone used to megalomaniac exaggerations of genius like the author of these lines.

Was everybody just hanging out?

Not wanting to miss anything, indeed right from the start one encountered kind of a different atmosphere here: was everybody just hanging out? Well, not everybody, just the chimps. They apparently had a good time while their human compadres were holding on to their champagne glasses with a tight grip. From their equally tight lips and frozen smiles thin trickles of conversations found their way to any other lost person next to them.

The primates didn't seem to care much. Sometimes one of them was showing his teeth which bared anything but a smile. Were they mimicking the predominantly white crowd in black whose smiles didn't invite any friendliness whatsoever? Among the primates clothing was optional, brown seemed to be the habitual garment. From time to time changing positions offered a red bare bottom, prompting the crowd to wonder: is it waxed?

Smartphones were taking pictures of the carefully framed colorful patterns hanging at the wall waiting to be stared at. Hardly anyone seemed to be interested.

Barely hidden boredom was dominating the event right from the start when a guy from the local cultural department was rambling on about the incredible audacity of those scientists who initiated the project researching the creativity of our closest ancestors, some of which produced those pictures which provided for the event at hand.

As kind of a drawback it has to be mentioned that all the selected primates had to be trained to use color and canvas - actually none of them volunteered. They had to be bribed with food. Sometimes the paint itself served as such. That chimps could produce something at all didn't surprise. After all they likewise had a brain searching for patterns.

Somehow this writer missed a few elements which he actually appreciated so much that long ago he had decided to devote his life to them - as an art critic. He missed the spark, originality, inspiration and imagination. Yet most of all he missed the effects of intrinsic motivation, something he had always admired about artists: their tenacity, the ability to hang on to an open-minded way of developing and producing that could change any second according to what the work required, or which new insights and ideas kept coming in.

Intrinsic motivation made them question anything including themselves and dive into a process of passion and wonder, with no further incentive than their internal motivation which couldn't even be stopped by lack of support, money, resonance or space. He missed the challenge of expressing one's humanity so openly, he missed intimacy and the uniqueness that the mainstream always seemed to mix up with self-serving obsession. Maybe because the streamers themselves had lost this life-thread long ago? Was it too hard to say that mainstream mediocrity is where nothing flows and nothing grows?”

Re-reading his own article, John Doie felt the last remarks coming back at him like a boomerang. Was his intrinsic motivation still working? He made it his personal challenge to look for and listen to it more intensely.