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Art can be joyous or tedious. I have spent days dutifully wandering the Louvre, through galleries of lookalike paintings appealing only to obsessed scholars. I have zoomed through rooms of black canvasses and blue dots, gazed at objects I am supposed to appreciate that I do not understand, that I am apparently not supposed to understand because by understanding I would miss the point of the work, which is not supposed to have a point.

Art, to my unscholarly mind, brings pleasure or pain: it is aesthetically attractive, it entertains or disturbs. I sense that Rene’ di Rosa has the same sense of art that I do. Maybe it has something to do with our shared pasts as questioning journos.

 

Di Rosa, a former newspaper reporter, had the sense to buy land in the Carneros district, at the southern edge of Calfornia’s Napa Valley, in 1960. Its hilliness and sparse development makes it one of California wine country’s most scenic regions. He began planting grapevines and collecting art, attending local shows and buying pieces that pleased him. Di Rosa sold off the vineyards and made a bundle, but retained 217 acres as an art and nature preserve.

 

Here is a 35 acre lake (complete with a little island of palm trees) a meadow filled with sculptures and strutting peacocks and three galleries crammed with modern, local art. There is hardly a work that does not beg a nod, a smile or an outright guffaw (observe the world's tallest file cabinet, stuffed with the remains of a MG roadster.