Read the following article from the Guardian.
This could be one of any number of stories about companies struggling and/or adapting to market conditions and trends. Well in actual fact that is exactly what it is, even down to the vocabulary, analysis and spokesperson utterances. Except it is in Culture > Art and Design
I received a few emails about the previous post asking whether the medication had run out and suggesting that I should go and have a nice lie down.
I gave the wrong impression about Duchamp - I have a lot of time for the artist and for his contribution. Remember that this happened at the start of the Dada movement, after WWI when the world was falling apart and the values exhibited by the cosy and comfortable world of the bourgeoisie and their art just didn't make sense any longer. That gives strength and meaning to a gesture which otherwise could just be seen as playful and empty. Duchamps contribution was wider, both as an artist and by his association and collaboration with his contemporaries, particularly Picabia and Man Ray.
So I wasn't blaming him for the current predominance of conceptualism.
I rejoice in the diversity that our culture and art is capable of providing. My safety valve goes off when I perceive this being eroded. I think we can see that happening everywhere, in the globalising uniform dreariness of Macdonalds and Starbucks, to the dumbing down of the media and of course conceptualism in art. This came home to me just by recent visits to independent galleries. Conceptualism seems to me to be the Japanese knotweed of the art world, starving everything else of oxygen and the space to grow.
But I aint going to change anything so I should just take it easy. Maybe we need another Marcel Duchamp to put a bomb under what has become the cosy comfortable bourgeois art of the 21st century
When Duchamp submitted his urinal to the New York art whatsit he committed an act of genius, He said to all those bourgeois with their nice pictures
- "you think that's art? you don't know nuthin. this is art, and it's art because I say it is, and you can't prove otherwise and in fact the very act of me saying that it is art is art itself".
Little did he think or know that he was instigating the biggest commercial phenomenon known to man. Conceptual Art - or how to make squillions of dollars out of absolutely nothing. A few big dealers and so called artists just fix it all up and con some folk with a load of money who need to buy some cultural credibility to carry around on the glitterati circuit and who don't know any better and all the VAn Goghs are sold anyway. Now these guys are in luck, because they have the market sown up. But they're greedy like all sorts of people with lots of money so they need to find the best way to make more and more quickly. Duchamp to the rescue. "We'll just take whatever we like and call it Art and sell it for lots of money - no-one cares - they just want to know the cost, and no-one can tell us it's not Art. And it's no good just taking a photograph of 1 highway intersection - we'll need 12, or 15, or a 100 and make them really big. Oh and try and make sure there are no cars or people in them, we need to try and have some kind of critical focus in case someone asks. Or how about getting 24 soup cans and filling them with sand, or maybe we'll fill one with sea shells, and, no, lets turn all the ones with sand upside down so we have a lot of little soup-castles, Campbells soup, mind you and, or maybe we could get a box and fill it with.. i don't know... hard boiled eggs and toothbrushes or something or maybe you could just empty the contents of your fridge into a plastic bag and hang it from the ceiling, whatever, anything'll do. We'll let a few critics and pundits in on it and they'll tell us why it's art and all the rich people'll want to buy it.
