FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks

Given the state of arts funding at least in the US, and depending on how old you are, people tend to forget these things.

The last art history class I took was my sophmore year of high school. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget particulars if it's that long ago.

Duchamp's art also (arguably) marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism - our current era. It's definitely modern, but it has little hints of postmodernism in it.

I've never taken an art history class, but I do know of Duchamp, and I do think his name is known by anyone with even a passing curiosity with the world of art.

The fact that he's relatively unknown here says a lot about the users of this site: highly knowledgeable folks, whose knowledge is probably much more specialized that they realize.

Do you have any evidence of this tendency outside of SV?

Feynman famously suffered from this so it's hardly just computer people.

I spent some time in drug design, surprised at how stupidly things were done in the life sciences. Of course once I was immersed in the field I discovered that many of those so-called "stupid" things were quite rational and even most of the ones that were the result of legitimate path dependence, and not really so stupid as to be worth changing.

I also learned that people in the field had already thought about this and the current state was a result of people trying to fix procedural/cultural bugs.

Of course the residual of subtracting all those "many" things that turned out to be legit still left a few stupidities and tweaking a couple of them was enough to make a big difference to our startup.

Also: our own field (I'm back in computing) is full of path-dependent oddities and wholesale cargo cutting as well. I think it's human nature.

When I was working on my MFA thesis, I came to a realization that feels like it might overlap with what you're describing.

It's a little hard to put a bow on the idea (and why it isn't trite...) at this length, but basically: I felt a connection between the experience of trying to parse some intentionally difficult/impenetrable ~modernist texts, and the experience of trying to parse older texts where the phrasing is dated.

They're too unfamiliar to parse with fluent ease, and the experience of fluent reading is just fundamentally different. In one case, the text is like a Rubik's cube, and in the other it's hard to even realize it exists separately from your instantaneous understanding of it.

I would imagine there is considerable intersection between people who say Duchampian with people who say Orwellian, Freudian, or Kafkaesque. It seems to me a fairly normal English construction.

Duchamp's readymade and Duchampian readymade don't mean the same thing. A skilled imitator could create a Duchampian readymade, but it wouldn't be Duchamp's work.

https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another...

If I listen to my psychologist friend talk with their other psychologist friends about the DSM it’s total gibberish to me.

Same goes for anytime I need any work done on my car other than an oil change.

This may be the starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

I think they couldn't really. If you look into modern artists they are extremelly talented and their unique style that seems like _anyone could do it_ comes in later stages in their life.

It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)

Some modern art does not stand on its own. It requires the expert explanation to transform it from garbage to art. For myself this is “clever art” and has little cultural value.

Damien Hirst once had a work on display and a janitor threw it out - because he truly thought it was garbage. My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more. The guard quickly looked the other way while motioning us to leave.

Working in the gallery world I would read the epic descriptions of works for sale. A lot of ink went in to creating and describing the value of art works that had no apparent worth. It is fashion to be sold and adorn and tell your friends about.

Not all modern art is like this, some works can be appreciated for its intrinsic properties. But this requires more skill, and dedication, and is rather rare.

I value art similar to the rule about food - if your grandmother would recognize it as art then it probably is, if not then maybe not. And all things art - it boils down to opinion. This is mine.

Art is also about communicating ideas, concepts. Most abstract expressionists could paint photorealistic scenes in detail, but they just found it boring and went on with soak staining or squeezing tubes.

I bought a tea-towel gift in the local modern art gallery:

Modern Art == "I could have done that" - "Yea, but you didn't"

Ha! You turned sum into product and have now produced a novel derivative work.

If you did it as DIY, yes, but not all modern - really, contemporary - art is done by Important People who get magazine interviews. A colleague of mine at a web design shop had done his degree in fine art. He was into minimalism and Arte Povera, and his main work was a large ball of grey paint which he had kept with him for years. He would grind down stuff from his daily life and mix his own paint (which he named after himself) to add to this ball. It just kept growing and growing.... Weird, but fun.

The reason why /r/DIWhy exists at all is because people find weird objects interesting.

I could totally see the top post in the subreddit with the carpet-pedal bike as part of a season exhibition in the Tate Modern.

This is based on a true story. And the required understanding was that the power had to be gone for long enough that it actually shut down completely.

Okay, but then none of the actual artists are making iconic logos day after day either, and when they make any at all, it's not from some artistic genius that us philistines could never understand, it's because they make a ton of variants and then a whole crew of marketers refines and A/B tests it before settling on "the" icon.

When people say “anyone could do that” in reference to art, they’re usually not just saying that anyone could copy that after having seen it. Of course most people could take a famous novel and type out all the same words. They’re saying (regardless of whether they’re correct) that the actual conception of the new work doesn’t seem like it required significant creative effort.

Logos are often quite highly-tuned with a lot of iterations to get just the right proportion, colour, etc. It's actually quite difficult to make a good quality logo.

You do realize that often artist don’t physically make a large portion of larger art pieces. Nor do they set them up in galleries it is often done by teams but the artist gets the sole credit.

I don't think this expresses the problem accurately. Something like facebook is "obvious on retrospect" in the sense that lots of people could theoretically have built a similar site if they just had the idea and the right timing, but didn't so so.

A lot of modern art I've seen maintains the "lots of people could do that relatively easily" aspect, but it doesn't have the "if someone else had built the same thing, I can see how it would have succeeded." Ie it's easy in retrospect, but it's not obvious.

My personal take on it is just that a lot of it is basically nonsense / garbage, but perhaps I'm just cynical and closeminded.

The project then seems to embody how FedEx treats its own space.

It'd be nice to find a megacorp that treats its tools with love.

The USPS gives out flat-rate boxes for free. The assumption is of course that they'll recuperate the cost when you buy postage. But I have wondered if FedEx would accept a USPS box, and this "proprietary box size" thing makes me think no.

>Suggested use: VCR or CD player.

Uline sells so many products. I wonder how old that description is.

SSCC does stand for Serial Shipping Container Code, not “Standard Serialized”, per your GS1 link.

The rest of your comment is correct, though; they’re for tracking an individual box (the same idea as a postal tracking number), not “a box with the same dimensions” and I have no idea where the artist could have gotten that idea from. They do have a prefix that only the company generating them can use, but that’s just to keep the numbers from each company in a separate namespace to anyone else’s.

I also can’t find (with an admittedly cursory search) any evidence that FedEx’s standard boxes even have SSCCs, and it seems like the purpose would be served just as well by a proprietary tracking number on the address label.

Regarding your edit, this is covered under §4.4.1.1 of the GS1 spec:

> An individual Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) is a unique number, which remains the same for the life of the logistic unit to which it is assigned. When assigning an SSCC, the rule is that an individual SSCC number must not be reallocated within one year of the shipment date from the SSCC assignor to a trading partner. However, prevailing regulatory or industry organisation specific requirements may extend this period.

The definition of “logistic unit” is slightly impenetrable, but AFAIK it’s intended to mean a container with specific item(s) in it, so reusing a box for something else would make it a different logistics unit. If you wanted to track the container itself you’d assign it a Global Individual Asset Identifier.

Of course, you can do whatever you like in your own system, and trading partners can make arrangements with each other; but in my experience companies will get pretty annoyed if you send them the same SSCC multiple times since it confuses their system.

In fact SSCC is simply and unique identifier for particular logistics unit (ie. the one indivisible thing that you send from point A to point B) and does not in any way describe some kind of class of things sharing the same geometry. In the global logistics context GS1 managed SSCC namespace tends to be used only for "large" items (ie. pallets and LTL outsize boxes) while typical package services use either completely proprietary labeling or something that vaguely follows UPU rules for labeling of registered mail. IIRC the Code-128 barcode on FedEx packages contains GS1-128 datastructure that purpotedly encodes SSCC, but I'm not exactly sure that it in fact is correctly formatted SSCC and not just some kind of fedex-proprietary number.

I took an experimental art course during my undergrad and this exact issue drove me insane. We went though dozens and dozens of examples of experimental/digital/interactive art, and each time the piece would really engaged me up until the point where I read the artists rambling justifications for their work. They just couldn't shut up and let the works stand on their own.

The opposite of something can still evoke the thing it opposes :-)

Visually they look similar.

  > Does the owner of an art gallery own the photos I take during my paid visit? 

Yes? Paying for a ticket does not grant you a license to reproduce the art.

Or just laminate the glass?

> In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value.

It removes the value for the unobjective man who cannot free himself of such biases and judge matters on their own merit.

> This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution.

No, it would be akin to reading animal farm without knowing anything about the auctor, or the conditions and process by which it was written.

Art providing a commentary on an external event, and being judged upon how well it does so is an entirely different matter.

Of course, the artist can also be considered if what the art attempt to do is to provide some kind of commentary on it's own artist.

The argument you raise here is tantamount to that refusing to consider the auctor of a physics paper as well as how the research came to be in judging it's merit, is tantamount to not considering how well the physical results in it model the physical realities they attempt to describe.

> This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later.

And this is exactly why I believe judging Shakespeare by modern readers is prætentious.

A modern reader can never truly have Sprachgefühl for 1500s English. He may be able to read it, but it's hard for him to truly be capable of assessing whether language truly sounds beautiful.

> Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.

It is what gives art power to the unobjective, biased man who cannot compartimentalize and judge matters on their own merit.

This does not limit itself to art. You will find that the same same man who judges art by the artist, will also easily be convinced that the exact same dish tastes better, if he be told it was more expensive.