How Brian Eno managed to piss in Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal | Hacker News Reader

How Brian Eno managed to piss in Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal

dangerousminds.net

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I though Duchamp was making fun of the art world. There is a large group who are obsessed with curators and experts, and will praise anything that's put in a gallery whether it's any good or not.

Edit: well it seems that was wrong, so let's derail the thread some more with a strong recommendation to watch "F for Fake", and a long Twitter rant I found about how to approach the "are video games art" conversation. https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/882933955174989825

It's the other way around: he was critiquing what was popularly not accepted as "art". He submitted Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists, who claimed they would exhibit any art submitted to them, and was rejected.

http://www.teemingbrain.com/2013/05/09/orson-welles-on-chart...

If you don't have time to watch a two hour documentary, at least watch this part, which is beautiful.

Yes, when people ask "is it art?" they're ussally actually asking is it good art? Who knows?

It's part of something broader. A lot of people seem to need whatever they enjoy (science fiction / comic / video games) to get a seal of approval as great and serious art. They complain that people don't respect the art they enjoy. Of course, when someone tries to do something serious in the genre/medium they complain that it is the wrong kind of whatever. You're supposed to respect first-person-shooters and space opera as great art. They don't want you to make anything that actually tries to be literary.

re the underlying jab at post-modernism, post-modernism has gone beyond using aestheticism as a way of evoking emotions and simply gone ahead to evoke emotions directly (starting with expressionist art evolving out of impressionist art). the ultimate "deconstruction" of art is when evocation of emotion transcends medium - when "art" makes you feel a certain way without the bias of being a physical object, or anything at all.

contemporary art is the current physical limitation of this logical extreme. art today is about trying different media through which they can get a reaction out of you.

This Twitter thread is just really really bad. The argument it attributes to Benjamin is just not what his essay says at all. In fact, Benjamin was a pioneer in what we'd call "media studies," and he wrote about popular entertainment long before the rest of academia took that sort of thing seriously.

And if that were all that were wrong with it, it'd be a petty criticism, but this attitude--of assuming every critic is an elitist snob--just pervades the whole thing. Critics don't hate Thomas Kinkade (dude gets his name wrong, also, twice) "because he mass produced his art"--so did Warhol, so do most modern artists on some level. They hate him because his work is kitschy and boring. It's the elevator music of painting.

Contra the author, comics are taught in higher education. There was a whole furor roughly a year ago because religious students at Duke were angry about being assigned Fun Home. There are academics who specialize in science fiction, who write about comic books. This entire long thread is against an enemy that doesn't exist anymore.

Asking for game(r)s to be taken seriously is specifically asking the elitists to legitimize the medium. Non-elitist critics might take games seriously but they don't count because culturally they aren't the gatekeepers to legitimacy.

I think the Kinkade point wasn't about mechanical mass production but mass appeal. Critics might not like the work but he sold zillions of prints. There's clearly a disconnect between what people think is good and what gets praised as good.

That's the thing, though--who are these gatekeepers he's imagining? Game studies are growing rapidly in academia. So-called "elite" media (which is, let's face it, much cheaper to consume than the games themselves) don't necessarily exclude games anymore. The New Yorker runs articles about games, for instance.

But it's silly to act as if dislike of games never has anything to do with quality. A lot of games, even now, have stilted dialogue, poorly-considered plots, inept voice acting. They're bad _as games_, and this applies even to many of the widely-praised ones. It's counterproductive to act as if lack of coverage for games has nothing to do with this.

Many people like Thomas Kinkade. Many people like hundred-hour long video games with badly-dubbed dialogue, repetitive battles, and lots of bugs. People should be allowed to like what they like, but that road goes both ways. Critics aren't obligated to pretend they enjoy things that actually make them miserable, just because that's what people are buying.

>>he mass produced his art"--so did Warhol, so do most modern artists on some level

Not sure how far back "modern" goes but Florence was full of workshops[0] during the renaissance. A lot of the good stuff (David IIRC) was produced by teams of professional artists to some degree.

[0] http://matthewgream.net/Professional/HistoryOfArt/workshops_...

>I though Duchamp was making fun of the art world.

This piece is part of the DaDa art movement. They were not so much making fun of the art world as they were deliberately revolting against the world. It started about the same time WWI did and it's mostly symbolic of people (not just the artists) rejecting a society that could cause such a massive war.

Reminds me of the cleaning lady who tossed an installation in the trash because she mistook it for garbage. [1] Apparently, they were able to re-create the installation before the trash was taken out, but I believe leaving it would've sent a stronger message.

[1] https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/8qkvab/a-janitor-thr...

Dadaists and Surrealists would have argued that the cleaning lady did an an even better aesthetic gesture than the original artist by throwing the installation to the garbage...

The cleaning lady was actually just a performance artist.

Happens surprisingly (or rather unsurprisingly) often. This article http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002-01-06/entertainment/02... has a few more examples, including Joseph Beuys, who's work had been destroyed countless times. Many cases ended up in court. A baby bathtub of him filled with what looked like trash was scrubbed by politicians who partied in the museum and then used it to cool their beer and clean their glasses. The artist was not amused.

It can go the other way, too, where some object left by a visitor becomes part of the exhibit: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/pin...

Fantastic pun:

"Since “decommodification” was one of the buzzwords of the day, I described my action as “re-commode-ification.”"

That's not a pun.

it is. perhaps you missed the word "commode" in "re-commode-ification".

Interestingly, "commodity" and "commode" are cognates. They both derive from the Latin "commodus" which means "convenient" or "suitable". In different ways, commodities and commodes are both things you need like-right-now-please.

Even better! Thanks for the TIL :)

There are four of them. Tate owns two; one for display and one in case of any 'accidents'

Source?

it is a _favourite belittling expletive goes here_ urinal there are millions of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)#Origin "Other scholars such as William Camfield have never been able to match the urinal shown in the photo to any urinals found in the catalogues of the time period." "an artist's multiple was manufactured in an edition of eight in 1964."

That is literally the point of it

The original (1917) is lost. There are more authorised replicas than four (I think 16). The one in Tate is the Milan version from 1964[0]. Tate owns the one numbered "2/8". I don't know which other Tate should own, the known versions are all somewhere else. I don't see a single reason why they would sit quietly on an unknown version just for "accidents".

[0]: There are 13 of them: 8 regular, 2 for museums, 2 proofs, 1 prototype (which was not listed officially at that time). Apparently they made at least four other unsigned replicas at that time under the direction of Duchamp.

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