The Art Institute was set to announce Tuesday that it beat out other top museums to purchase Bottle Rack, the first of Duchamp’s “readymades,” a series for which the artist would go on to beatify other ordinary objects including a snow shovel and a urinal. Bottle Rack, visitors Tuesday will be able to read on the museum’s newest wall card, “upended tradition and artistic convention by revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is.”What are the other 2? I would have thought the urinal...
... but I'm thinking the bottle rack beats the urinal because it was the first of the readymades.
Then there's the question of how to display the bottle rack. Display is key, because the whole idea is that an ordinary object is presented as if it is art and, because of that, it really is art. But Duchamp isn't around to perform the magic. The museum must do it. A decision was made not to put it with the Dadaist and surrealist things because it seemed too "didactic" to make it another example of a genre. So it will appear in a Modern Wing gallery to express its "broader place in art history."
“The appearance of this work should be provocative,” said [deputy director and chair of the modern art department Ann] Goldstein. “To me, every inch means something.”Shockingly, this much-vaunted item isn't even Duchamp's original bottle rack! It looked like junk and his sister threw it out. Many years later, in 1935, he bought another bottle rack that was exhibited and that one too got lost, and — for another show, in 1959 — he had to get a third one and asked Man Ray to go get him another one. This one, which was sold to Robert Rauschenberg, is the one in Chicago:
It is this lineage — from the original Bottle Rack, through a famous surrealist [Man Ray], to a renowned American modernist influenced by Duchamp [Robert Rauschenberg] — that makes the museum and the art dealer sure of the specialness of this particular version of the five surviving iterations of the sculpture that is interpreted as Duchamp’s original readymade. (He also later produced an edition of 10 bottle racks.)Ha ha. So many bottle racks! But this is the one bought by Man Ray and sold to Robert Rauschenberg.
“Of the number of Bottle Racks that are out and about this is the most important,” said David White, senior curator of the Rauschenberg Foundation.Salesmanship! The art of the deal.
“If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image,” Duchamp said in 1964, according to an essay on the artist from a 2003 exhibition on the readymade. “What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.”The concept is free, but there is still something to sell.
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Sensing a theme tying together the last three posts. Fraud, rip-off.
MoMA and DaDa issues galore!
Art is broken.
I feel so avant-garde and artistic!
We have a big white commercial urinal like this one on one of our garden walls. It came from a restaurant that we bought years ago when we had a smoked food Deli and eliminated one of the two restrooms but kept one urinal and the ginormous mirrors.
The urinal is a wall planter. My husband, who is a plumber, retrofitted it with a water stream that can run down the back if we feel like turning it on for a neat sound effect. We have trailing flowering plants in it in the summer. Fuchsias look very nice.
Great conversation piece!
seems like the name for it should be: this is not a piece of art
The R. Mutt "Fountain" is not the original urinal, either. That was destroyed by the show jury. Nor was it "done" by Duchamp: he stole it from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Has there ever been a time when pretending meant so much to one's social status? Pretending joke art is real art...pretending Western women are oppressed...pretending the West is the source of global ills...pretending biological differences don't exist...pretending fathers aren't necessary...That may be the 20th century's most enduring legacy.
This acquisition has already gotten one Chicago museum employee fired after he said, "Nice rack" in front of female co-workers.
There was an old culty (crappy) movie someone stuck Warhol's name on, and the plot was: a guy wanted someone to kill his "artistic" child, and it sounded pretty sensible. Then I figgered out he was actually saying "autistic".
“What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.”
That is extremely uninteresting.
My new work of art is called The Brooklyn Bridge.
The Brooklyn Bridge itself is not the work of art ( and would not actually be mine to sell. ) But the concept of the Brooklyn Bridge as art is itself art. And I'm willing to sell this to a museum for the low, low price of $100,000,000.
The art of the deal is very easy if one party is a shameless fraudster (i.e. virtually anyone who lists "artist" in his CV) and the other is a fucking idiot.
"Bad"
It's amazing how many people play along with such obvious fraud. If the donors to the museum don't care, though,....
Art Inst of Chi, Something about one being born every minute, or maybe it had something about fools and what they do with their money,
Ceci n'est pas une oeuvre d'art.
There are parallels to the Dutch Tulip Bulb craze, but, if you're on the right side of the trade, it's a good thing. Anyway, if the market collapses, you'll always have a pot to piiss n.
JohnAnnArbor said...It's amazing how many people play along with such obvious fraud. If the donors to the museum don't care, though,....
The "Chicago Park District tax" (p6) pays part of it, and, for some reason probably no stranger than corrupt politics, "The Institute is a not-for-profit corporation exempt from federal income tax".
"This acquisition has already gotten one Chicago museum employee fired after he said, "Nice rack" in front of female co-workers."
The "nice rack" joke will be made approximately 1 million times a year at the Art Institute.
It will be hard not to say "nice rack."
Sophisticated people will believe that they are saying "nice rack" in a special ironic way.
If you ever go to the Art Institute of Chicago, you too will say "nice rack." Just say it and get it over with because the effort of not saying it will cause it to linger in your mind. Just get it out. Relieve yourself.
The urinal has long struck me as a sign of Duchamp's failure. He set out to destroy the concept of "art" by providing an object that met the accepted definition of what art is, but that clearly was not art and that anyone could see was not art, in somewhat the spirit of a mathematician providing a counterexample to a theorem (a quintessentially French way to approach art!). And his counterexample got interpreted as "art," with no sense of the absurdity of doing so, enabling the concept of art to survive for another century. The art world got neither the philosophical point nor the joke; it just carried on as if its concept of "art" still meant something.
(Note that I say "its concept of 'art.'" I think there are other possible definitions of the concept of "art" than the modernist one that Duchamp accepted and sought to destroy. The trick is to make them explicit. But that's a task for aestheticicians, not for people who are already committed to the modernist conception.)
"This acquisition has already gotten one Chicago museum employee fired after he said, "Nice rack" in front of female co-workers."
Prof. Althouse, how do you feel about the guy losing his job over that joke?
"the whole idea is that an ordinary object is presented as if it is art and, because of that, it really is art." This is what came to count as an idea in the 20th century. Really.
"But Duchamp isn't around to perform the magic." Magic, you say. Huh.
It's amazing how many people play along with such obvious fraud.
If you play along with the fraud, aren't you complicit in it?
Dada was invented to make Bolshevik realism look vital by comparison. It's just one piece of a vast leftwing conspiracy against Western civilization.
If any of Duchamp's "work" defines sculpture in the 20th century, then sculpture in the 20th century was a complete load of rubbish.
Ann Althouse said:
"Relieve yourself."
That wouldn't fit; they don't have the urinal, they have the rack.
I still remember my visit to the London Museum of Modern Art. My daughter, who is into modern art wanted to go and I went with her.,
I was looking at one item, a piece of wood about 12 by 6 with nails driven into it in the outline of a fish.
A string was wound around the outline.
I was wondering who had the job of keeping these pieces of junk maintained.
The ancient Greeks considered arms and armor as art.
They were made and decorated by artists.
These were fit offerings to the Gods, they were sometimes gifts from the Gods, they were used as decorations in stately homes, they are mentioned constantly in the Greco-Roman "Bible", the Iliad.
Modern and ancient weapons are often objects of great beauty, superlative design, and deep symbolism, the most ancient, probably, of all mankinds symbolic relationships with created objects.
Why then are they not "art" in the modern art-academic sense?
One suspects that there is a great deal more going on here than art, in modern times, vs the ancient and common understanding of art. As Tom Wolfe pointed out.
Chicago has the best-dressed emperors.
-not6W
The old Soviet idea of planting a tank on a plinth as a war memorial makes a great deal of sense. That is indeed a work of art, a designed object with an implicit aesthetic and a symbolic meaning.
It, the tank, a war machine, in its outward and inward form, is the result of a savage evolutionary competition, just like a Greek helmet pleasing to the Gods. It also is the result of a divine inspiration. This besides the symbolism the Greeks would have understood, akin to their displays of panoplia.
Interesting. Bottle Rack was perhaps the first unaltered readymade, but it was preceded by Bicycle Wheel. I think Fountain is more important than either and given the 1913 date on Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack really loses a lot of the justification.
For the other two most important works I would bracket Fountain with Jeff Koons Puppy. That gives us two ludicrous works for a century of ludicrous art.
The hard part is picking a third piece. Maybe Brâncuși's Bird in Space as a beautiful sculpture in its own right as well as an inspiration for modernism, which dominated sculpture for 20 years.
I was looking at one item, a piece of wood about 12 by 6 with nails driven into it in the outline of a fish.
A string was wound around the outline.
I was wondering who had the job of keeping these pieces of junk maintained.
I was at the U of Michigan's art museum years ago, thinking they had hung a side of a big wooden shipping crate on the wall as "art" among the many classical pieces they have. How annoying.
When I realized it was a PAINTING of the side of a shipping crate, I was actually quite impressed. That took skill.
Taking the result of some anonymous artisan's labor (say, a bottle rack or a urinal) and putting your name on it does not. That's just theft of credit.
Of armaments considered as art in modern times , I can recall only one case, that of the museum tour of pieces from the arsenal of Graz (the Styrian Armory).
What interests me is not the saying of "nice rack" infinite times, but the concept of saying "nice rack."
Known Unknown said...
What interests me is not the saying of "nice rack" infinite times, but the concept of saying "nice rack."
Exactly. I leave the actual saying of it to my assistants.
Duchamp is nonsense as sculpture.
(I mean, I like Dada and Futurism and deliberate nonsense. I like abstract art per se, and nontraditional art.
[Equally I think Pollock is bollocks and love traditional representational art even more.]
I can respect Duchamp as a sort of performance art against stodginess.
But it's not sculpture; he didn't sculpt anything.)
Clickbait: a 'nice rack' Rick Roll?
-6W
And we make fun of people who think it would be wonderful to have a piece of the wood Jesus died on.
And the weasel goes Pop, Art.
-6W
Art is like God. You can’t really define It or prove It exists, but most people are sure It does and that It is good.
upended tradition and artistic convention by revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is
No, it simply exposed the existing intellectual bankruptcy of the era.
The old meaning of the word art was a display or application of skill. The fine arts were then the display or application of skill to the field of aesthetics. Every piece of "great art" from, say, the Renaissance fits this perfectly.
But nineteenth-century philosophy and intellectual fashion flew away from logic as hard as it could in the name of the "transcendental", which, in fact, actually meant nothing more than the sub-rational. In the field of aesthetics, this took the form of Schopenhauer's blathering, which, by declaring great art transcended skill and standards, actually accomplished nothing more than devaluing skill and destroying standards.
Duchamp's actions pointed out this intellectual bankruptcy. Unfortunately, the arts simply embraced the reductio ad absurdum rather than reconsider Schopenhauer.
Known Unknown said...
What interests me is not the saying of "nice rack" infinite times, but the concept of saying "nice rack."
What interests me is a nice rack.
As always, Tom Wulfe hasthe last laugh,
"Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.
Like most sudden revelations, this one left me dizzy. How could such a thing be? How could Modern Art be literary? As every art-history student is told, the Modern movement began about 1900 with a complete rejection of the literary nature of academic art, meaning the sort of realistic art which originated in the Renaissance and which the various national academies still held up as the last word. Literary became a code word for all that seemed hopelessly retrograde about realistic art."
For the Toilet issue this might be fun
https://remodernreview.wordpress.com/2016/11/11/1917-a-shattering-discovery-from-the-year-art-went-into-the-toilet/
That should be Tom Wolfe
#3 was Karen McDougal's breast implants. It was tragically lost to future generations when someone commented, "Nice rack".
revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is
One used to think that it was about representation of certain reality with some transcendent quality to it, or something like that, but now we know that today an artwork is a complete scam between government elites who take your tax money to give it to their crony friends who produce crap, together with an entitlement and condescending attitude that you are too stupid to appreciate their artistic brilliance.
I was at the U of Michigan's art museum years ago
I forget, but I don't think I've seen it there last couple times I've been up there, but is that pile of scrap iron that they dumped on the grounds still there?
Duchamp was original and making a statement that was artistic for its time.
The trouble is that people have been duchamping for the last 100+ years, thinking that somehow they're artists about it.
That's the problem with a lot of modern and contemporary art, it's really decades out of date saying things that have already been said long ago and beating dead horses of a no longer existing culture. Meanwhile, it's also not beautiful.
Now if someone could find away of making non-kitschy art that celebrates the noble and good, that would be an accomplishment for our age.
I realized awhile back that I have the literary ability to participate in art, I can BS long strings of sentences with pseudo-profound meaning with the best of them. My fundamental problem was I didn't take myself seriously enough. A person has to be convincingly (or truly) absolutely earnest in their literary flights of description.
It's the earnestness that sells even more than the description. Someone takes something absurd seriously, people think maybe they know something that's hidden to the masses. And no one wants to be part of the masses.
I forget, but I don't think I've seen it there last couple times I've been up there, but is that pile of scrap iron that they dumped on the grounds still there?
Yes, but they moved it to the side of the building:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2750384,-83.7398191,2a,75y,339.96h,84.81t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swhu65UgBsxM9o5a9tRtKmA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
They added an addition to the front and put TWO MORE iron monstrosities there:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2758146,-83.7407135,3a,75y,89.45h,85.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1skXoGta2ImRYA3pweMWh9cg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Now if someone could find away of making non-kitschy art that celebrates the noble and good
That's impossible under current definitions. Let us consider a summary of Tomáš Kulka's "Kitsch and Art" from the publisher:
"To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness."
Now, consider, say, Da Vinci's Last Supper under those rules. Instantly identifiable and emotionally charged to his audience? Absolutely. Does it say anything about the Last Supper that wasn't said in the previous 1,500 years? Not at all. Accordingly, it is kitsch, artistically and aesthetically worthless!
Which is why there is the Kitsch Movement.
"that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes."
That's the challenge that I think artists have to risk to rise above the banal. Art is so worried about kitsch that it simulates depth by obsessing with chaos and deconstruction. But in doing that art has become isolated from its purposes. It's a ghetto for narcissists and virtue-signaler, a way for rich people to compete with each other, peacocks on display.
It has conceded popular influence to kitsch and wealth-grabbing media.
But the reality is that artists aren't actually able to see beyond their own egos anymore. That's all they have and the idea of lifting their self and society higher now seems impossible. We live in an era of emaciated souls and our art exposes this fact to future historians.
It's a concept all right, or con for short.
Pardon my interruption. Duchamp's first Readymade was the Bicycle Wheel originally produced in 2013. I'd link to a photo but they all appear to be reproductions (painted stools are the least of the forgeries).
A stop at the Philadelphia Musueum of Art in 1971 with 2 much artier best friends, spending hours in the Arensberg collection of hyper-modern art, affected me greatly in a very positive way. It was all there, Duchamp's readymades, his earlier paintings, the Large Glass and his final work Waterfall/Illuminating Gas. After reading your post I dug out my worn copy of "Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne", purchased at the museum gift shop with a 1971 pub date, so likely first distributed where I bought it. Incredible to reread after all these years. Rings so true. The cover photo isn't the one shown on the current copies via Google image search. Instead it's old MC wedged into a concrete corner.
Cheers!
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