Salvador Dali died a few weeks ago. He was 84. Most people know Dali for his surrealist paintings of the 1930s, most notably Persistance of Memory, a barren landscape featuring several melting watches. It hangs in The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dali's eccentric appearance and lifestyle are almost as well known as his art. He claimed his curling handle bar mustache was an "electric antennae" over which he received the secrets of the surrealist world.

In New York a woman once asked Dali how he made his mustache stand up.

"Dates, the fruit from the palm tree. For dessert I order dates. I eat them and before I wash my fingers in a bowl I rub them on my mustache to smooth and stiffen it. The advantage is that it attracts flies. Flies love sugar and I adore flies. My most paradisiac moment is when I am lying naked in the sun covered with flies like a piece of carrion."

Dali was expelled from school in 1924 for refusing to take an exam because he thought he was more intelligent than the professors sitting in judgment of him.

Once when he was asked to speak before a group, he arrived inside a diving bell and gave his speech from within. Asked to contribute a piece of three dimensional art to an exhibition, he sent a taxi-cab inside which rain fell during the show. Dali also appeared on the pages of Rolling Stone alongside Alice Cooper.

Dali's primary artistic contributions came during the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Surrealism is the attempt to put the workings of the unconscious, dreams, onto canvas.

John Russell of The New York Times wrote that "there was nothing Dali could not do in the way of exactitude: When the occasion called for a representation of a landscape, a seascape, a skyscape, a beautiful woman, a loaf of bread or an expensive watch, he did it to perfection in a style that was all reassurance. Only after a closer look did it become clear that the watch had gone soft like overripe Camembert, that very peculiar things were happening to the beautiful woman, and that it would be a mistake to put too much trust in the lyrical perfection of the land and the sea and the sky."

Dali regarded himself as divinely inspired, a force of nature.

Many critics have disparaged his work, particularly his later experimentation in film (most notably Un Chien Andalou, which opens with a scene of a cloud passing across the moon and cuts immediately to a scene of a knife cutting an eye), stereoscopic 3-D images and holograms.

George Orwell referred to him as "a dirty little scoundrel and as anti-social as a flea." As for his paintings, Orwell termed them "diseased and disgusting."

Andre Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, questioned Dali's later motives by suggesting that the letters of Salvador Dali be rearranged to spell Avid Dollars.

These critics miss the entire point of Dali's art. Dali himself said, "Compared with the Zurbarans, the Velasquezes and the Messoniers, I am nothing. But compared with present day painters, I think I am not only the best, but the only one. Modern art is a disaster."

Modern art, in its abstract form, has ceased to be a meaningful means of communication. By freeing itself from any basis in realistic representation, abstract art has become relative. Art is in the eye of the beholder and one is free to make of a ''work of art" what one wants.

Dali defined his art as an attempt "to systematize confusion and to contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality." When he did strange things with the objects in his paintings, it made those who saw them feel that the world as we know it had vanished.

In this age when our means of perceiving our world and lives has brought us so much misery in the form of pollution, war and unhappiness, a critic of Dali's power is sorely needed. He made us aware that there might be other alternatives to our present day mess, and not to be arrogant enough to think otherwise.

Dali once said, "In your life -- tragically reduced by the aspect of the world transposed by commercial art -- even the vicarious reality of a cybernetic brain could reconstitute your day-by-day life."

Dali's life ended rather sadly. His wife of 49 years died in 1982, leaving him in a deep depression. Dali was severely injured in a fire in 1984 and bedridden for most of the remaining five years of his life.

In a fitting epitaph he once said, "It's hard to keep the world's attention for more than half an hour, and I've managed to do it almost constantly for half a century. But in a world that is becoming more and more surrealist, it's getting to be more and more difficult to invent things that can still shock."

So on one of those surreal nights at the bars here in State College, have one for Salvador Dali.