Opera Buff

As a child I spent hours staring at the sky and pondering infinity. A part of me wanted desperately to imagine a limit to space, but another part of me couldn't wrap my mind around the idea of endlessness. Likewise, I continue to obsess about the humanoid who picked up a piece of burnt wood or something hundreds of thousands of years ago and made marks on a cave wall, thereby creating the very first piece of art. Whatever possessed him (or her) to take this astonishing leap, and did this individual have any conscious sense of its significance? That then leads me to wondering about who the first critic was, that troglodyte who had zero ability to draw even crudely, but who neverthless wrinkled his nose, squinted with an air of studied expertise at the scratchings on the stone in front of him, and declared, "the right rear leg is longer than the others, gazelles don't look like that."