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 ©Miklos Legrady. Cear, , 36" x48" - 91.44cm x 121.92cm, acrylic on canvas. Putting Descartes Before the Horse This lecture was presented at the UAAC conference (United Art Associations of Canada) at Welland University. in London Ontario on Oct. 25, 2024. That painting is of an eight year old boy named Cedar, who asked me to begin my presentation the same way I start his bedtime stories. Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, there lived a man named Robert Storr, who was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He said that in the 1960s the art world moved from the Cedar Tavern to the Seminar Room 1. Is there a problem? Yes, because art is primarily non-verbal while seminars feast on discussion. Academics put Descartes before the horse; the idea seems more important than the practice. Now comes the really bad news. Most fine art producers, artists, teachers, critics, and curators, graduate from similar schools and share similar values, which are reflected in their production, association, and the systems created thereby. Surely a cultural blindness results from such group judgments. When misinformation enter such a network it like a virus. And unfortunately some foundations of contemporary art are based on misinformation. The art history and theory that we learned in school and teach our students, is evidently contradicted by the factual history, the period documents. There is also the nonsense and failure of logic we allowed vested interests to embed in the cultural canon, the cultural matrix, to promote their own agenda.This got so bad that curator Kitty Scott wrote on Facebook a few years ago that no one knows what art is anymore. Great! (irony)Every other profession knows what they are doing! Shouldn’t we try to find out? We know that art is a value judgment. We know the etymology of art leads us to expressions like “the art of” medicine, “the art of” critical judgment, the art of comversation, and such, that insist art is the mastery of a skill, coupled with intuition and a personal vision… but not everyone agrees.Marshall McLuhan wrote that, much to his dismay, art today is anything you can get away with.But that has to be dishonest, if you need to “get away with it”… I’m writing a book, “Duchamp Was Wrong” the notes are on my website. We don’t have much time so I will present a few examples that prove we really have to clean up art history, we seriously have to clean up our act.  Walter Benjamin was a lyrical writer.But if you google Benjamin, you will read about a social scientist, an early Marshall McLuhan, who was so prescient he could accurately predict how people in the future would look on art and society. Well, time has been very unkind to Walter Benjamin, as everything he wrote in the 1935 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was Marxist Propaganda, since then disproved. 2 “The art of the proletariat after its assumption of power… or the art of a classless society… brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.. Communism responds by politicizing art.” Marxism states that the individual has value only as part of the mass, as a member of a class. It is the masses that create history, so there can be no individual genius or personal talent. These are bourgeois illusions about the uniqueness of individuals or their products. Benjamin’s core argument in his famous article is based on a material dialectic; that art’s only value comes from a bourgeois belief in the uniqueness of the work, making it a cult object. He wrote “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” 3 Aura referring to the spiritual and emotional force of a work of art. These supposedly vanish when art is reproduced. The work is then no longer exclusive; being available to the masses,it losesg its cult value of uniqueness. However, Johannes Gutenberg disagrees; books are made by mechanical reproduction yet the power of art and literature is enhanced when reproduction makes the artist or author’s work available to a growing audience. The aura of a work of art is greater through mechanical reproduction. “The work of art in the age of mechanical Reproduction” is a symphony of obvious errors and glaring contradictions. 4 But for nine decades no one dared correct this misinformation. (read more-->) We now move to music, and John Cage, an amazing acoustic artist.But he said things like “Everything we do is music”, which is perplexing since we would then lack the perspective to differentiate what music was, since the word “everything” would be quite adequate” to express everything that we do.Cage also said that ambient noise was music, and he created his famous 4’33”, which proved the opposite. No one listens to 4’33”, or to ambient sound, or noise, the way we listen to music. Music is a creative statement, always an intention and never an accident. Even those acoustic artists who only work with accidental sounds do so intentionally, with intention. (read more-->) And now we move to Sol LeWitt, an amazing visual artist. His legendary “Sentences on Conceptual Art” and “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” were published in Artforum in 1967. He wrote that in conceptual art, the idea is dominant; the execution of a work of art is but perfunctory. Turns out he was wrong. The person who proved Sol Lewitt was wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt was, of course, Sol Lewitt himself, when he was deeply disappointed in perfunctory executions of his own work. He eventually realized that everyone has ideas, but few have ability, which tells us it is the execution which turns an idea into a work of art.But he never revised his writing, it had been published in Artforum, so we didn’t find this out till five years ago, in 2019, when Larry Bloom published Sol Lewitt’s biography 5. For fifty years Sol Lewitt was one of the artists who turned Postmodernism into the Post Truth movement(read more-->) .But he wasn’t as bad as Marcel Duchamp. I know, I know, everybody knows that Marcel Duchamp had a deep, deep understanding of art.Everybody knows this except the very few people who actually studied Marcel Duchamp and who all realized, much to their horror, that Duchamp had very little understanding of art, if any. No one who does would say the things Duchamp said throughout his life.What did Marcel Duchamp say? There’s a 1968 youtube video 6, shot a year before he died, Joan Bakewell interviews Marcel Duchamp for BBC’s Late Night Line Up series, where Duchamp talks about after his early career, after the Large Glass, when he stopped painting, and he decided art was unimportant to him or to culture, art was discredited, it was an unnecessary adoration, and we should get rid of art the way some people got rid of religion. Then he adds that this is a difficult position for him to hold, as he had remained an artist all his life, but we often do things for reasons we don’t understand. Today we understand. His pal Picabia wrote in the DADA Manifesto that art was the opiate of idiots. 7 Why did Marcel Duchamp and Picabia say such stupid things?They were Dadaists!Dadaists say stupid things to shock the bourgeoisie!Then he forgot his motivation and took his task seriously, it being to destroy art.But as he admits in the BBC interview, he forgot why. Duchamp was praised by the art community since he wanted art to be an illustration of intellectual ideas rather than a work of visual, acoustic, or body language. These take a lot more effort. The art community supported this intellectual trend round the late 1950s, when art moved from the Cedar Tavern to the Seminar Room, and artist started to earn a living teaching in universities instead of by making and selling art. Teaching intellectualises art. It is also time intensive, reviewing student work and grading papers, faculty and administrative meetings, fundraising et al, so there's little time left for studio work. Thus an intellectual art does not take nearly the amount of dedication required in the field of non-verbal languages, the foundation of art, which requires learning new languages, visual, acoustic, or body language. Duchamp became the figurehead who degraded art from complex language down to illustrations of ideas. Of course, a snow shovel hung on the wall is not as meaningful or requires as much time and effort as Diego Rivera’s paintings.  Duchamp was an amazing painter, his “Nude Descending a Staircase” was the high point of the 1913 Armory show. But Duchamp wrote that he didn’t lie to work, and painting was hard work. 8 He decided that painting was superficial,nothing more than a decoration for the living room wall, so painting was dead.. Today, the science of linguistics says the long awaited death of painting is an unrealistic expectation. Painting is a non-verbal language, a system of notations much like literature, but operating on a different bandwidth. Painting and literature are not likely to die, they’ve been around since the dawn of history. We must assume that painting will not roll over and play dead, just because Duchamp wants to shock the bourgeoisie. In Dario Gamboni’s ‘The Destruction of Art’, at the end of his life Duchamp explained to Otto Hahn “that his readymades had aimed at drawing the attention of the people to the fact that art is a mirage.9 Today we know that it is the readymades that are the mirage. On the readymade website toutfait.com we read of a letter from Duchamp to his sister. “Dear Suzanne, tell the family the Independent show opened to great success. One of my female friends sent in a porcelain urinal under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt.” 10 We thought the urinal was Duchamp’s, well that’s a mirage .Duchamp appropriated the urinal without giving any credit to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 15 years after the opening of the Independent show, once Elsa died of syphilis in a mental asylum. If you want to know the value of a work, look to the provenance.Duchamp appropriated the urinal to discredit art, as the semiotic language of the urinal tells the public that art is to piss on. Do we artists piss on our work? Eventually, Duchamp decided the readymades were not art, since he had said art was discredited and it would not do for his work to bee discredited. In the Phillipe Collin interview, “Marcel Duchamp Talking about Readymades “ Duchamp said “The word ‘readymade’ thrusts itself on me then. It seemed perfect for these things that weren’t works of art, that weren’t sketches, and to which no term of art applies.” 11 No one would mistake the readymades for a work of art, although they certainly bear the features of a mirage, while art is very real. Art requires an exceptional level of skill and intuition. More than is found in a snow shovel, although the design is quite functional. Even readymades have designers. Duchamp also said taste is the greatest enemy of art and he had always contradicted his own taste as a result. 12 But that makes no sense if art is discredited. Well, whatever! Taste is the expression of the uniqueness of an individual and without taste we have no art.Duchamp could not keep saying these things without paying the price and suffering the consequences. He lost his ability to make art, he lost his motivation for what he said was unnecessary and discredited, and the art world so admired him!“Duchamp stopped making art!Such a genius! He has gone beyond art”!What a stupid thing to say! In Pierre Cabane’s “Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp”. Duchamp had already told Jasper Johns “one didn’t mean to do it, didn’t mean to stop making art, he couldn’t make art anymore, it was like a broken leg.” 13 But he didn’t give up completely.For twenty years, in a room behind his now empty studio, he poked and prodded at Etant donné in a last ditch desperate attempt to shock the bourgeoisie, because Etant donné was a vagina seen through a peephole, Duchamp’s version of a porno website.But the muse was gone and like any spurned lover, she wasn’t coming back. (read more-->) Donald Judd, Marcel Duchamp, and Thierry de Duve all wrote that art cannot and should not be defined; art is anything an artist chooses to call by that name. Of course what cannot be defined is lost into the background like tears lost in the rain. If art was anything an artist chose to call by that name, such irresponsible license would corrupt both artists and art world alike. We would be at the mercy of scammers and charlatans. This author’s intention in writing this was to inform culture; information changes the paradigm Political science says your culture is your future.And so we see the similarities between DADA and MAGA. DADA for decades told the public that art is anything that Duchamp ocan get away with, so MAGA replied that politics is anything that Donald Trump can get away with. If we have not seen as far as others, it is because we were standing on the shoulders of very short giants… or the giants were standing on our shoulders. FOOTNOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 |
