I've been saying that phrase-- "where art and real life collide" -- every week for almost two years now, ever since Studio 360 went on the air.

What we mean by that is that we consider art to be inextricably interwoven with life. That "culture" isn't something that just exists in museums and symphony concert halls. That art is available to everyone all over the place, and it's only a matter of keeping our eyes and ears and minds open.

The other afternoon, I experienced art and real life colliding right in front of me on the streets of New York, over and over again.

It started with a thundershower. I had just walked out the door of the big old building where we produce Studio 360, when the rain began pouring down. And so I paused under the building's sheltering outdoor colonnade, leaning against a column, waiting for the rain to stop.

And looked up, where I noticed -- really noticed -- the amazing vaulted stone and tile ceiling of the space. I knew that the architect Stanford White's firm designed the building at the beginning of the 20th century. But I had never spent time savoring this simulated Renaissance chunk of it.

So there I stood, at the beginning of the 21st century, listening to the downpour echoing through a 30-foot-high stone pavilion. Suddenly, behind me, there was another sound ricocheting around the stone. It was "Are You Experienced," the Jimi Hendrix tune, being performed live on an electric guitar by a tall skinny black kid about as old as Hendrix was when he played it back in the 1960s.

So I stepped to the other side of my Corinthian column, leaned back and listened to "Purple Haze," and then "Manic Depression," and then I was joined by a guy wearing a yarmulke who applauded like crazy after every tune. I stood there, in public, smiling -- actually grinning.

The rain ended, I walked to the train and got off at Times Square: there, amid the grey concrete and steel and permanent grunge of the subway station I saw a huge Roy Lichtenstein painting, in tiles, freshly installed overhead. It was a lovely, heartening surprise.

As I walked up Sixth Avenue to my next appointment, I noticed in the ground floor of a high rise the flash of foot-high words spelled out in red electric lights. The words said: WOMAN WITH GUN READY TO KILL SELF. And after a second or two, the words blinked off. A bit later, again: one or two seconds of WOMAN WITH GUN READY TO KILL SELF. Then, darkness.

It was exactly like a certain kind of contemporary art -- one of those public installations by the artist Jenny Holzer involving cryptic and pointed sentences. And then I realized that it was CNN's new street-level broadcast studio.

The studio wasn't up and running yet, and technicians inside were testing their new news-headline zipper, using a made-up story fragment. How cool: for a moment, I'd looked at something normal, even banal, and thought I was seeing art.

Finally that day I was due for a party celebrating a friend's book at the New York University library. As I approached the NYU building, I found myself walking near four young men, undoubtedly undergraduates. And right there on the street, these red-blooded American boys were passionately arguing -- about the meaning of Art.

"Yeah, okay, fine," one of them conceded, "art is creation. But what else?"

I was in Greenwich Village, and young people -- young men of the Maxim and Jackass demographic -- were debating Art, for fun.

And for the fourth time that remarkable afternoon, I was grinning, happy to be adrift in the culture of the street ,utterly delighted to be reminded that art and real life actually do collide.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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