Defining art isn’t easy—it’s like pornography in that you know it when you see it, or hear it, or experience it, as the case may be. I’ll be the first to fess up to the core fact that I don’t always know what art is, since the term is thrown around like discarded tissue. I knew an “artist” in the eighties who actually said if he puked on the sidewalk, and called it art, then it was art, since he, as the artist, defines art. Truth is, puking on a sidewalk, no matter how you rationalize it, is not art. It’s puke on a sidewalk.

The problem with artists defining art is it turns the entire process into an opaque little box of self-congratulation, where like-minded sycophants convince themselves that everybody else just isn’t hip enough to understand that sidewalk barf is art because the artist said so.

The indie film Imagination doesn’t take its pretensions that far, but it does take itself very seriously as “art.” And therein lays its fatal flaw. Ostensibly, Imagination is a film about the varying perceptions of reality—a favorite subject for philosophers, quantum physicists, and stoners alike. Co-written by brothers Eric and Jeffrey Leiser, Imagination is the story of twin sisters, one autistic, or actually suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, and the other, legally blind, fated to be totally blind at some indeterminate point. Being twins, though, they of course share a telepathic bond and a form of communication known only to them. What their parents don’t see is that their daughters are linked by the power of imagination, which in no small part leads to the dissolution of the family—the father runs away, retreating to the local speakeasys, and the mother is killed while driving on the freeway during a conveniently timed earthquake. The twins, effectively orphaned, are taken in by the kindly psychotherapist at his institution, where things take an “unexpected”, if telegraphed, turn.