PureX
Veteran Member
I agree.Willamena said:Um (/me turns and waves at her invisible straw double that dopp must be talking to). Ah.. You're just trying to get me to admit to the futility that is the attempt to define art, as Purex said earlier, aren't you?
Art is recognizing the artist in the works. If someone puts Duchamp's shovel photo in Home Depot, and in doing so I happen upon it, and in happening upon it, I recognize the photo as not belonging there, and in recognizing that I also recognize a bit of the person who committed this act in his act, then yes, I would say that act is art. That is, of course, separate from the art that Duchamp made when he created his captioned photo.
And I'll go further. The original snow shovel that Marcel Duchamp presented has long since been lost, and over the years various other snow shovels have been used in it's place, as Duchamp's sculpture. And I suspect that if we were to go to Philadelphia today, to the museum that owns most of Duchamps work, we would find one of these shovels on display. And Marcel Duchamp didn't buy it, the museum did. And sill, I would consider this not only a work of art, but of Marcel Duchamp's art. Because in this case, the "work of art" was the act of buying a hardware store snow shovel, and placing it on display in a gallery, with the title: "In Advance Of A Broken Arm". It is in effect an example of "conceptual art", meaning that the medium is the concept, itself, and the physical components are just symbols or emblems of the concept.
Please keep in mind that in discussing Warhol and Duchamp we are discussing two of the most extremely experimental artists in art in the last century. And keep in mind, too, that both of these artists considered their own persona as "artists" to be fodder for their own artistic endeavor. Most of us are aware that Andy Warhol became the "Andy Warhol Show" and was well aware his persona, and used it in much the same way he would use film or canvas and paint or paper and ink to express himself.
And Marcel Duchamp did the same thing, only with even more deliberation. There are still graduate art students out there writing dissertations on Duchamp's "The Green Box", or his notes on "The Large Glass", thinking that they're unravelling the mysteries of this genius artist, completely unaware that these were very clever manufactured nonsense, written after the fact just to mess with them. Duchamp loved to spread the tale that after he ended modern art (the hole in the painting back in 1917) that he did nothing for the next 20 years but sit in a rocking chair in his second floor apartment window and watch Picasso and various other modern artists walk back and forth between their studios and the bar, trying to steal ideas from each other. Later, he claimed that he spend those 20 years writing "The Green Box", which is also nonsense. He was fully cognizant of how the artist's persona among the public had a life of it's own, and that he could manipulate it by making various statements and claims, and he quite enjoyed doing that.
Few artists understood quite as clearly as Marcel Duchamp just how 'art' is the artist in the decisions he makes, as documented by the medium he chooses. He understood this so well that very often his medium was only the choices he made, and the art "object" that documented this were just the found and bought objects that he presented to us. Duchamp MADE us see that art was in the collection of decisions being made, because in his case it couldn't be in the objects, themselves. They were mass and machine produced.