There is a colossal eyeball in the city of Chicago, staring southeast toward Lake Michigan. In a more fantastical world, it might have fallen from a giant’s eye socket as he lurched across State and Van Buren Streets across from the Harold Washington Library Center. It is thirty feet tall, perfectly circular, and covered with a tangled map of blood vessels. It is disconcerting. It is art.

We’ve been asking the questions “what is art?” or, more pointedly, “why is that art?” for centuries now. With contemporary art tearing down every boundary and challenging every taboo, it’s easy to forget that this question isn’t a new one. Even Impressionist paintings that are popularly considered beautiful today—say, Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, the painting that became eponymous with the movement—were radical for their time, and caused an uproar amongst contemporary critics. If it seems like a stretch to compare a giant three-dimensional eyeball to a muted sunrise on canvas, remember that the founding Impressionists were just as tough-as-nails as many contemporary artists have to be in defending their work against the chorus of “why is that art?”

Five years ago, when I worked at an art museum, the curator of contemporary art commissioned a piece of art for the wall of a new gallery. Huge graffiti-style letters stretching ceiling to floor spelled out ART CAN’T HURT YOU in bright fuchsia and orange and gold. The curator wanted visitors to laugh, to relax, to not let edgy installations mystify or muddle their museum experience. It’s a question we should consider more often, especially when confronted by a giant eyeball claiming to be public sculpture. Why are we so hesitant to consider it art? What prejudices define our experiences with art that might, with repeated viewings, begin to melt into acceptance?

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I’m not squeamish about much, but eyeballs are on my shortlist just below all things entomological, so I expected the worst as I slouched toward State and Van Buren for the first time. Even the word itself, eyeball, stutters uncomfortably off the tongue. And in some ways, Tony Tasset’s aptly named EYE delivered me unto my nightmares: a massive fiberglass eyeball freed of its socket, a perfect sphere of veins and iris and pupil, the top of which you can see from a block away. I climbed into the grassy park that cradles it and I walked around the entire eye, shuddering at the detail of the veins, which fit together too perfectly to be just haphazard squiggles of red paint. The veins, a kind of premeditated architecture, splatter thirty feet high, disappearing the closer they get to the iris, a circle of gold and orange and blue swirls shooting out from the pupil like snakes. Impression, Sunrise this was not. I took a deep breath.

Tasset’s monumental ode to optic anatomy has mixed effects on people. The most frequently heard adjective is “creepy,” and I was certainly not the only person examining it skeptically, but passersby seem to love to interact with it. It doesn’t blend in with its surrounding, and it is certainly not art you can ignore. My first visit to EYE was on a hot, sunny weekday, and two college students dozed in its shade. My own prejudices were clear as I wondered how anybody could sleep in the shade of, well, a thirty-foot eyeball. Surely the giant from which it fell would haunt their dreams, one-eyed and angry. The more prudent passersby merely paused to snap a photo with their cell phones, or to step up to read the nearby label.

On another visit to EYE, I pointed it out to a friend from the safety of a Brown Line train car as we rattled above it late at night. She cringed. “Creepy,” we agreed, especially under the patchy streetlights.  I don’t know how long it takes for these prejudices against art to subside. Perhaps nearly as long as it takes for prejudices against people. Impression, Sunrise might be on millions of calendars, posters, and notepads now, but somebody once looked at it and cringed, too. Somebody once looked at it and asked, “why is that art?” Somebody once looked at it and felt uncomfortable that their definition of art was being defied.

On my final visit to EYE, a perfect Sunday afternoon attracted dozens of tourists out of their air-conditioned hotel rooms and off Michigan Avenue,  Chicago’s main drag. They didn’t just pause, but actually stopped to take pictures of their spouses or partners or children, each of whom would reach up to touch the lower belly of the eyeball, smiling toward the camera. If these tourists had been there on my first few visits, I didn’t remember them. And EYE was still disconcerting, but at least I’d stopped cringing at the mass of blood vessels and started examining the threads of gold and blue that formed the iris. The thick swirls of paint were not so unlike Impression, Sunrise, really. I touched EYE for the first time; it was smooth and warm, and I wondered how Tasset had applied the paint. Had he projected the veins onto the fiberglass globe, tracing them with a paintbrush or airbrush? I wasn’t sure I loved EYE or that I was any more comfortable with it than on my first visit weeks earlier. But at least now I could consider it, could trace the veins with my hands, could find the beauty in those hazy shoots of gold and blue.

As I left that final visit, I noticed a daisy in the grass, half its petals pulled off in a game of “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.” I wondered which petal had been pulled last.