"It's only a way of putting myself in the right position for that ideal public. Because the danger is to please an immediate public—that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, if you wait for your public, that should come 50 years.. 100 years after your death, that's the right public I want."
"It's a habit, a repetition long enough to become 'taste'. If you cut it short (after you've done it), it stays as a thing by itself. But if it's repeated a number of times, it becomes a taste."
I was reading a chess book and it had transcript of a match played by someone Duchamp; was amazed to learn that it was the same man as the artist. At one point in his life he transitioned from art to chess, even wrote books on openings.
I'm not sure he was endearing. He made light of a lot of things other people take seriously, that's true. If his only appeal was an ability to wear his learning lightly, he wouldn't be remembered. There's something corrosive and more than a little bit inhuman about much of what he produced, and, for the people who approve of him, that's what makes him significant. He's not an avuncular figure:
Kara Swisher regularly bitches about how tech execs aren't into humanities enough to comprehend the level of responsibility they have. But from the outside, I observe that Duchamp, other humanities types of figures, and humanities related articles show up on the HN front page every week.
To those who live in SV: is this because the HN audience is an odd crowd, or is there a lot of merit to Swisher's criticism?
I don't live in SV, but I've been on HN for a few years.
One thing that is certain is that few if any participants in the "art world" (technical term for the active professional business of mediating art via museums, galleries, magazines, etc.) would find the way art is discussed here to be impressive or relevant. It's a specialized field, but Swisher is right that tech folks tend both to be fairly uninformed about the humanities, and also to overestimate their ability to discern what is going on in other people's areas of specialization.
I've got a postgraduate degree in contemporary art and I follow it pretty closely. It's not cynical to dismiss much of the art world as vacuous. At the same time, successful art speaks to current human concerns in a way that's undeniable.
Unfortunately, the art scene reflects the anti-intellectual character of contemporary life. There are critics and art intellectuals, but their role is somewhat trivialized, because nobody really takes the intellectual side of art that seriously (because the artists don't). So, in an anti-intellectual milieu, "intellectuals" are stuck playing a bit of a two-dimensional, token performance of seriousness.
Art on HN, I would say, plays a role that is similarly circumscribed and trivialized. It's present, but it's not taken seriously—it performs a stereotyped function in the discourse. There's discussion of art, but it's not integrated with the actual critical canon. It's almost like a 19th C blackface minstrel performance rather than the involvement of an actual black person (if that's an OK analogy to use).
Interesting view, theoh. I wonder if you have any thoughts on what customers in contemporary times look for in art?
You write that "successful art speaks to current human concerns in a way that's undeniable." In general, do you find that customers look for this when they're aiming to buy "quality" art, like paintings, these days?
Most commercially successful artists are "supported" by collectors and/or institutions. That's what makes their work a good investment. To become eligible for that kind of support, an artist's work has to be deemed relevant by someone with a degree of clout. Not all collectors care about the relevance of the art they buy: some are just looking for a prestigious investment. But somewhere along the line, any successful artist has convinced some people that they are the real thing.
Insightful, this makes me think of the importance of the ecosystem in contemporary art, especially when you write: ""supported" by collectors and/or institutions", "someone with a degree of clout", and "convinced some people that they are the real thing." Thanks.
There's definite merit to the critique, I think. I'm sure HN users are only a subset of the population doing technical work, let alone the portion of the population that hold executive positions in technical fields.
There are some fantastic responses in this thread which are exemplars to the contrary, but I do believe the majority of tech workers are not well-versed in the humanities and also have a tendency to trivialize the humanities disciplines and treat them as easy to comprehend and acquire a passing mastery of--it'd be the same as some literati or historian learning some HTML or perhaps even python in an afternoon and claiming all this programming and software development business is easy baby stuff. You often don't see this however, as I believe intellectual humility is a virtue that finds better expression in the humanities than it does in the sciences or engineering. I think this may have something to do with the greater communal/dialogic nature of humanities methodologies and pedagogy, which is usually less of a good fit (or at least not tried) in engineering disciplines.
The reality, as others have mentioned, is that humanities disciplines are rich, brimful of complexity, and greatly informed by historical developments. I think the latter part is something people tend to miss or have an inadequate regard for when studying art or literature (and indeed, even some of the practitioners in humanities fields are guilty of this). We live in an age that is obsessed with novelty and often limits the scope of relevancy to this extremely limited field. Thus, you get a whole industry of artists who are doing nothing but copying each other or copying things that have been done years prior without being aware of it.
Like any discipline, art takes years of dedicated study to master—and not only to master creating work, but to master reading the work, to learn all the codes, references, techniques—the whole glut, really, of art history that manifests itself in a panoply of ways in any given piece of work.
I've met a lot of adults in the tech sector, and other sectors for that matter, whose cultural intelligence starts and stops with the latest Marvel film. There's a lot of cultural factors that play into this phenomena, but I believe the major ones are:
a. Hyper-specialization in schools. One or two 101-102 level "core courses" in the humanities is not nearly enough to produce individuals I would consider adequately educated in the liberal arts.
b. Depreciation or even scorn for intellectualism and 'high-culture' in America, which may stem from America's youth as a nation state, the conditions surrounding its origin (quite literally a divorce from the "old world" where a rich trove of art history and valuation of tradition and the past comes from), and its emphasis on capitalism (this relates to the issue in the sense that, if something makes a lot of money it's perceived to be meritorious and spreads through the cultural consciousness like wildfire and enjoys greater persistence)
c. The concept of Mass Entertainment, at least in the US, is something like a systematically administered narcotic. A lot of Entertainment is designed to "turn your brain off" to a certain extent, promotes passive engagement, and is more or less a system and concept that was devised, to great effect, to simultaneously placate and influence the masses and maintain the capitalist status quo.
d. Phenomenological "Purism"—this idea is best expressed through the idea of "spoiler alerts". One's experience of the artwork is supposedly "impure", instead of informed, if tainted by prior reading or supplemental material. This relates to positions of anti-intellectualism. Opinion, pure and simple, is valued above all else. One's responsibility when viewing art is no longer to make an informed interpretation, but rather to express a reaction or gut feeling about the artwork or to get some fleeting momentary joy out of the surprise of experiencing it for the first time. To be awed by it. In other words, to commit as little effort as possible to actually crafting an understanding of a piece of art, to take a wholly selfish orientation toward to artwork, to consume pure and simple. This is an incredibly common perspective in my experience, and it both does a knock-up job at devaluing and limiting art's role in society (good only for brief experiential flights of fancy, not for, you know, saying something significant and being a force of change) and ensuring the populous remains affixed to spectacles and simple systems of valuation such as monetary value.
Obviously there are plenty of exceptions to all the broad statements above.
A lot of the comments on HN art posts are people bitching about how they don't understand modern art or think a specific artist is undeserving of their fame, conflating "skillful execution" with artistic merit.
There's an argument on HN and other techie circles I see which is pretty insidious and it goes like this:
"There is very little meaningful content being exchanged between artists / fashion people / etc.
The successful people in these fields are the ones that are good at personal branding + PR. They don't have any significant skill or insight over everyone else."
Do you really think it's likely that millions of highly educated people are just exchanging noise and there is really no signal underneath it?
What many people miss is that there is a legitimate conversation happening in fashion, or modern art. It's just over your head, you don't understand it, so you dismiss it as nonsense.
And yeah, luck and personal branding are PART of success, like everywhere. But these fields also filter out most of the people who are not intrinsically excellent, in addition to being good at branding.
Did you read today's Lunch with the FT? It's between Jo Ellison and Victoria Beckham. There's an interesting conversation in the paper on Victoria's fashion design career, and the problems she's faced along the way with branding and investment, yet she's pushing.
Maybe they need a short primer to understand modern art.
What Duchamp did when he submitted his Fountain to an art expo he was a jury member of, was to send a giant middle finger to art critics of the time, which only focused on technique.
His message was: this is art because I as the artist say it is, and the purpose of modern art is to send a message. Art critics may or may not understand the message's meaning, but meaning there is.
To supplement that, a relevant Duchamp quote on how to find a piece of art's meaning might be of interest: "The most interesting thing about artists is how they live".
(And to HNers who read this and think it all sounds like mental masturbation, you are right: it is; but some artists are better at communicating the ongoing conversation, much like there are bloggers that are better at communicating what the coolest programming language or framework or pattern or what have you is.)
Also, I'd argue that a valid purpose of art is something akin to 'play', in which it explores ideas intellectually that are not suitable for the formalities of philosophy or science. However, this seems frivolous or useless to many folks, from the outside.
I watched a video[0] on the Art Assignment Youtube channel (which I highly recommend) about Agnes Martin's paintings which illustrates this (pun slightly intended.)
A literal interpretation of her work would be that she's just putting basic, pale, repeating colors and shapes onto a canvas. Simple, repetitive, obviously anyone can do that, so there cannot be any talent involved, much less any signal in the noise.
But they're meant to be attempts to describe emotions and abstractions without resorting to metaphor. One can disagree about the effectiveness of her message, but there is a message.
There is a link in one of the comments above by theoh. There is reasonable evidence to suggest the urinal was not even his work, but of a friend of his for which he (eventually, much to her dismay) took credit.
Edit: And also.. I see the comment put forward quite often that the urinal was about the primacy of the artist or the message in defining art. But what i think is often overlooked is it is also about the context (the gallery and the viewer) and the recursion of meaning inherent in the contextualisation. Ie. The meaning created in the viewers mind that 'found' objects can be art. And the subsequent finding of art-meaning in everyday life.
Maybe "modern art" is just a boring game compared to everything else in the noosphere. I mean for my cognitive buck, it seems like it gives a poor return.
"It's a habit, a repetition long enough to become 'taste'. If you cut it short (after you've done it), it stays as a thing by itself. But if it's repeated a number of times, it becomes a taste."