Visiting an art museum is a great way to gain an understanding of yourself without hiring a translator for your Sanskrit-speaking brain. Explore the modern roots of your refrigerator-art movement with today's Groupon: for $4, you get a ticket to the exhibition Until Now: Collecting the New (1960–2010) (an $8 value) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, located at the Target Gallery and running through August 1. Through a permanent collection of close to 80,000 works, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts aims to dunk the heads of the half-million people it welcomes through its doors each year into a diverse ocean of art.

With today’s Groupon, you’ll be able to skip the museum bouncer’s tedious riddle contest and enter MIA’s current featured exhibition, Until Now: Collecting the New, which takes viewers on a stroll through the last five decades of contemporary paintings, installations, photography, graphic art, and more. The exhibition is organized into five themes—post-war abstraction, 20th-century realism, pop art, found art, and shifting national identities—with each perspective offering a new understanding of art in our time, as well as indications of where it might go next. Along the way, you’ll get to witness the debut of Art ReMix, which juxtaposes new and classical artworks, allowing viewers to reinterpret both.

Before or after the exhibition, let your eye-sponges sop up the art juice of MIA's free permanent collections, a walking wormhole that extends through space and time from early Africa and the Americas to ancient China to contemporary Japan. Classical paintings, new photography, drawings, and sculpture will help art seekers remember what separates us from our less creative canine cousins (and why Mother Nature always loved dung beetles more), and 14 free current exhibitions allow viewers to expand their understanding of early world maps, the Old Testament, and much more. Afterward, complement your new headful of modern-art knowledge with a mouthful from the on-site restaurant and café.

Reviews

Here's what the local press has to say about the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' Until Now: Collecting the New exhibit:

• The best of "Until Now" is international, multimedia, and eclectic in style and format. The most impressive and intriguing pieces are not necessarily by the best-known names, either. – Mary Abbe, Star Tribune
• The exhibition surveys major themes in contemporary art over the last five decades, from the iconic (and now historic) pop art creations of Andy Warhol to work that embodies familiar 21st- century sensibilities, such as Willie Cole’s “recycled” sculpture…made of dozens and dozens of discarded black designer pumps. – Stephanie Xenos, Minneapolis
• In conjunction with the exhibition, selected works of contemporary art will also be on view throughout the museum in a variety of juxtapositions with the museum’s wonderfully rich and diverse historical holdings. – artdaily.org