CAC's Sunday Art Thread- Duchamp, Moron Art, and other crap

Very delayed edition.
After a long move, sketching, painting, tweaking a project, contacting a porn star for another mixed-media project, drinking,"falling" into a filing cabinet and a host of other things more important than blogging the art thread is here again.
First an introductory music video which both "gets" the bigger, sadder point of this weeks edition AND is the closest thing to actually seeing a Republican leadership meeting:

After the First World War, allegiances to many of the artistic traditions that had survived the challenges of cubism, expressionism, impressionism, fauvism and pure abstraction were shattered by a disillusioned, cynical generation of artists who inadvertently predicted much of what makes art "suck" in the eyes of today's majority. The most brilliant of these was Marcel Duchamp, whose horny woman-and-gay da Vinci two-for-one joke LHOOQ was blogged about here earlier:

Fountain, 1917. (photo from 1917 exhibition) Porcelain Urinal. Original lost, replicas at various institutions.

Funny thing is, I have had morons comment on this piece in multiple threads, and they actually sum it up well:

Duchamp ushered in modern art by establishing the idea of "ready made" art, which fit nicely with new developments in mass manufacturing, and it was an asshole, curmudgeonly comment on the modern age, anticipating the beatniks by several decades. He was a typical French misanthrope who stated that art has nothing to do with the artist once it's on display. The viewer gets to decide whether it's art, and they can "piss off." There was always punk.
Posted by: Tattoo De Plane

When Marcel Duchamp created "Fountain" in 1917 under the pseudonym "R. Mutt" as part of his "readymades", he was making a deliberate swipe at Western mainstream "fine art" traditions of elevating anything to art simply by setting it on a pedestal. Apparently, modern "artists" never quite got the joke.
Posted by: The Ghost of Flannery O'Connor

To all of the morons who had commented on it in the original threads, I will add just a bit more. Duchamp was being profound by pushing the ever-expanding boundaries of art to its inevitable conclusion- one in which the actual ability or skill of the artist is deemed irrelevant by the simple pronouncement of a given "work" as art. He geniunely believed that the declaration of art, and an audience, mattered as much if not more than the artist or his actual work. In the hands of tongue-in-cheek Duchamp, this idea is both thoughtful and comical- we can take the proposition seriously, but simultaneously laugh at its implications humorously expressed.

As for the copycats and the beatniks whose "art" erronously shove themselves onto the Duchampian family tree,
I simply give you Salvador Dali's reaction to them:
The first person to compare the cheeks of a young woman with a rose was plainly a poet. The second, who repeated the comparison, was probably an idiot...People have already forgotten that the founder of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara, stated in his mannifesto in the very infancy of the movements: "Dada is this, Dada is that...Either way, it's crap." This kind of more or less black humour is foreign to the new generation. They are genuinely convinced that their neo-Dadaism is subtler than the art of Praxiteles.

*****
Moron Art of the Week

Remember, to share your works, send JPEGs with title, dimensions, medium and year HERE to see it on AoS and to have your fellow morons praise/laugh at you.

First up is moronette MWR:

Autumn Birch 2009. Watercolor and Acrylic on watercolor paper, 4" x 5".

The Port of Ensenada 2010. Digital Photograph, 5" x 7".

Manmountain Molehill found his inner Duchamp and gave us this readymade, created on election night 2008:

Shattered LCD, Found object- glass, liquid crystal, gravity. 12"x9"

Exurban Kevin channels his inner Freud:

Backyard Agave #2, 2010. Digital Photo.

Mojo sent me a whateverthefuckitis:

Triskelion, 2010. Strange attractor visualization.

and finally, billypaintbrush gives us a standard feature of the art thread- at least one boob:

Robe, 2005. Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 28".

I will leave you this afternoon with a work in progress that should get Kratos mad because it uses my favorite painting/printing surface:

Now go away.

posted by CAC at 03:59 PM

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