Art is Art
The found object in art has been a subject of polarised debate in Britain throughout the 1990s due to the use of it by the YBAs. It has been rejected by the general public and journalists, and supported by public museums and art critics. In his 2000 Dimbleby lecture, Who's afraid of modern art, Sir Nicholas Serota advocated such kinds of "difficult" art, while quoting opposition such as the Daily Mail headline "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all".[4] A more unexpected rejection in 1999 came from artists—some of whom had previously worked with found objects—who founded the Stuckists group and issued a manifesto denouncing such work in favour of a return to painting with the statement "Ready-made art is a polemic of materialism".
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymade
I believe everyone is missing the point. Modern 'found art' pieces are unoriginal and uninteresting. Submitting a urinal as a piece of art in 1917 was remarkable, revolutionary. Doing much the same thing 70 years later garners one no credit. Demanding voting right for women in 1870 makes them progressive, and on the fringe of society, engaged in a war against the dominant culture. Doing so now would be met with derision and confusion at the pointlessness. Such an act is no longer revolutionary. Such an act is no longer important. Time and place are both absolutely crucial for determining the importance and meaning of something. People who live in a comfortable time and a comfortable place wish to blur that truth. They want to assert that reading the book lolita, here, in the united states, is just as subversive as reading it in Iran.
These smirking imbeciles without a sense of history seem to believe that everything they do is new and important. The artist may supplement the culture, challenge the culture, engage in personal expression or do some combination of all three. A shoddy imitation that purports to be something new is entirely unwelcome.
What would be revolutionary now, what I will do next year, would be to take a urinal, write "R. Mutt" on the side of it, and demand that it be displayed as art. This would be a precise imitation of duchamp. The gallery foolish enough to do so would expose the total bankruptcy and slavish devotion of 'the art world' to dead objects over living ideas. It would cause artists, art museums, and morons who 'enjoy' this piffle to take a step back. The whole point of the urinal was that it was NOT art. That NOTHING was art. It was not meant to allow persons of suspicious moral character to name anything and everything as 'art'. Dada wanted the most brutal exclusion, not the most idiotic inclusion. Dada wanted the word art to be empty. Dada would not allow art to exist. Your bed, your twig, your painting that a 5 year old could do, all of them are not art. There is no art. Take pleasure in what you want. Enjoy the paintings of actual five year olds or demand the finest classic art. Find beauty in majestic landscapes or fetid garbage cans. Enjoy what you enjoy. Art slipping away. Art is dead, or perhaps it never lived and was merely an illusion. Ejoy what you enjoy without giving it pretensions of value or meaning. Accept that the tastes of the self and the other may be different or the same, but take joy from both.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymade
I believe everyone is missing the point. Modern 'found art' pieces are unoriginal and uninteresting. Submitting a urinal as a piece of art in 1917 was remarkable, revolutionary. Doing much the same thing 70 years later garners one no credit. Demanding voting right for women in 1870 makes them progressive, and on the fringe of society, engaged in a war against the dominant culture. Doing so now would be met with derision and confusion at the pointlessness. Such an act is no longer revolutionary. Such an act is no longer important. Time and place are both absolutely crucial for determining the importance and meaning of something. People who live in a comfortable time and a comfortable place wish to blur that truth. They want to assert that reading the book lolita, here, in the united states, is just as subversive as reading it in Iran.
These smirking imbeciles without a sense of history seem to believe that everything they do is new and important. The artist may supplement the culture, challenge the culture, engage in personal expression or do some combination of all three. A shoddy imitation that purports to be something new is entirely unwelcome.
What would be revolutionary now, what I will do next year, would be to take a urinal, write "R. Mutt" on the side of it, and demand that it be displayed as art. This would be a precise imitation of duchamp. The gallery foolish enough to do so would expose the total bankruptcy and slavish devotion of 'the art world' to dead objects over living ideas. It would cause artists, art museums, and morons who 'enjoy' this piffle to take a step back. The whole point of the urinal was that it was NOT art. That NOTHING was art. It was not meant to allow persons of suspicious moral character to name anything and everything as 'art'. Dada wanted the most brutal exclusion, not the most idiotic inclusion. Dada wanted the word art to be empty. Dada would not allow art to exist. Your bed, your twig, your painting that a 5 year old could do, all of them are not art. There is no art. Take pleasure in what you want. Enjoy the paintings of actual five year olds or demand the finest classic art. Find beauty in majestic landscapes or fetid garbage cans. Enjoy what you enjoy. Art slipping away. Art is dead, or perhaps it never lived and was merely an illusion. Ejoy what you enjoy without giving it pretensions of value or meaning. Accept that the tastes of the self and the other may be different or the same, but take joy from both.
posted by Tristan Tzara at 9:18 PM
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