What People Call Art Never Ceases To Amaze Me

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

It’s been done before. Around 1915 or so, Marcel Duchamp hung a mathematics textbook from a rope outdoors in the wind and rain snow for months and years on end where it degraded from exposure to the elements. It was entitled “The Sad Equations.” It was a complex commentary on the difference between the ideals of the world of theories, vs the cold realities of the real world. Really it was complex, the meaning was only revealed if you knew the content of the text and how it related to his other works.

And this is the difference between your “artwork” and Duchamp’s. Duchamp was a world famous artist, and had a whole network of interlocking concepts that underlied his artworks, a group of concepts that was developed in conjunction with other artists and other art movements. The artwork was just once sentence in a lifelong dialogue between the artist and his peers, as well as the audience. Perhaps his life’s work was also a dialogue with all the artists who came before him (Duchamp was famous for misappropriating the Mona Lisa).

Duchamp’s artwork with the math book was one of the first performance art pieces ever made. That’s another requirement, originality. That’s why I say it is so devastating to tell an artist “it’s been done.” We strive so hard for new and challenging ways of expression and find someone has already said what we were trying to say, so your own expression just becomes trite and redundant.

62

If the government has to steal from productive workers in order to pay for it, it aint art.

63

Contemporary art has little to do with the artist being a skilled drafts person.
If one has an idea, they can hire a skilled person to do the work.

Conceptual art is about the idea inherent in the work, and although it is convenient to have , so called, artistic abilities it is not necessary.

Its old hat, to think that art is about the demonstration of manual skills.
Its about ideas, like literature, and science.

The physical human body, its liquids and all its contents, is fertile ground for exploration, as a material and as a site, for artistic expression.

And,…Why not?

64

Hmm… Barking Spider says works presented by The Metropolitan Opera, The National Gallery of Art, and Lincoln Center are not art because they get federal subsidies paid for by poor oppressed working class people.

FYI, research has shown that every $1 spent on arts subsidies resulted in about $24 in income generated for the community as a whole. Money spent subsidizing the arts generates more return for the dollar than almost every other investment the government makes. Your life would be poorer, both economically and culturally without government subsidizing the arts. Your 27 cent annual contribution from taxes paid off handsomely.

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Somehow I doubt I’d be poorer if Government did’nt subsidize “the arts.”

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Iamthat - I’m not talking about manual skills, I’m talking about an artwork displaying some form of “excellence,” for want of a better word. The art may be in the idea, the execution, the technique, whatever - but the artwork needs that aspect to elevate it above the mundane. Otherwise, it’s schlock.

Granted, I am judging a work based solely on the information contained in the OP’s link (I think we both are), and I might have an entirely different view were I to see the actual work. I find nothing in the work as reported to engage my interest, excite my imagination or invite my admiration. Apparently you have - but it seems to me you are doing all the work. I don’t mind being challenged by an artist, but I’ll be damned if I do all the work and let him get paid for it.