We are surrounded by would-be painters, musicians, filmmakers and authors with tortured souls and delusions of grandeur, obsessed with making the “next great American novel” or some other masterpiece.

People everywhere absolutely have the right to do this and make whatever it is they want to make: but I, for one, am sick of it.

We artists, art-lovers and people who call ourselves both are so wrapped up in the concept of art and beauty and symbolism, that we have become an elite people: silly and arrogant and full of our own self-importance. We’re a culture of peacocks, marveling at unexplainable shapes and words, nodding our heads wisely and pretending to find meaning in the meaningless.

It is time to cast off the desire to produce and consume only the “meaningful”: we need to recognize and appreciate entertainment for what it is, without any pretense of “art” marring this appreciation.

Take the movie “300.” Terrible, terrible movie. Historically inaccurate, laden with gratuitous sex shots, grotesque killing scenes and inspirational and meaningless sound bites. Pure, unadulterated tripe.

Yet, pure, unadulterated tripe with no precepts of being anything but that.

I’d choose a crass movie like that one any day over a seemingly artistic piece of self-indulgent crap with long shots of sky with hip Indie music playing in the background.

When we watch movies or read books that are guilty pleasures: mine are “America’s Next Top Model” and John Grisham: we are making a choice. We are actively choosing to pursue what will give us immediate gratification.

In our world of study and analysis, evaluation and theory-based concepts, we need that immediate gratification.

We are human beings. Pure entertainment appeals to our emotions and base desires, brazenly giving us what art cannot: It quenches our thirsts to feel and enjoy and laugh in a way that will wrap up nicely; in a way such that afterwards, we can wipe tears from our eyes and smile, say “Whew! Now, what’s for dinner?” and get on with our lives.

And I’ll be honest: I don’t get all art. What makes some lines of words a poem and others not, what special technique makes three geometric shapes a painting: these things are often a mystery to me.

Yes: art, true art, is lovely and thought provoking and wonderful. But we cannot all be artists, and we can’t be subject to art all the time. Art is not the norm of life, it is the exception. We should find true beauty in nature, and only in the occasional man-created piece.

A pretty, brightly colored painting is sometimes is so much more fitting for our kitchen than any print of Van Gogh or Salvador Dalí that we can buy at countless poster sales on countless college campuses across the nation. Art is there to reflect true beauty in life, and we can make such beauty with our own actions and with our own lives. We don’t need to hang up paintings to announce our love of life: we can do that with life itself.

So, don’t be intimidated by snobby trendy pretentious people asking, “You LIKE that crap?” Put on your Spice Girls CD, open up a trashy romance novel, and turn on E!. Unabashedly, unapologetically love what you love, regardless of how much a liberal arts college class would or would not be able to analyze it. The writers strike has ended, and we can go back to enjoying the extreme and unpolluted pleasure of pure entertainment.