The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [108]
5. Criticism. Wherever artistic forms are found, they exist alongside some kind of critical language of judgment and appreciation. If the amount discourse generated by an art object were the sole criterion for arthood, then Fountain would pass at the top rank. With this reservation, however: the discourse centered on Fountain, unlike other art works, has nothing to do with its directly perceivable qualities—no loving descriptions of that white, gleaming surface, nothing about the object’s form. stands apart from a work such as unlikely to encourage the kind of critical shoptalk we expect from artists. (We don’t imagine readymade artists swapping tips on the best deals at Plumbing Depot, or spring close-out sales on snow shovels.) Fountain was sure to win a “most influential” poll among critics, curators, artists, and theorists, because it has produced nearly a century of endless talk.
6. Representation. Art objects, including sculptures, paintings, and narratives, represent or imitate real and imaginary experiences of world. Ordinary representation in any plain Aristotelian sense is clearly absent from Fountain. Duchamp’s readymades even resist the way which some of their close relatives, such as Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes his Campbell’s Soup cans, can be read as symbolic. Warhol was oblique comments on consumerist society and economy, and works can be interpreted as symbolic, even if they are not imitative. Fountain is different. It is not about urine or about the commodification plumbing in modern society. It is not even about ugliness. It is at heart Dadaist critique of the art world and art idolatry. This meaning, however, is indirect (some would call it a “meta-meaning”); it is not to read off the appearance of the object in the way that Warhol invites replicating popular-brand consumer merchandise.
7. Special focus. Works of art and artistic per performances tend to be bracketed off from ordinary life, made a separate and dramatic focus of experience. The intended appearance of Fountain on a plinth in an art exhibition central to the idea of a readymade. A resolutely not-special object that made special—by being given a title, being signed by the artist, or with poetry—and then put on display in a gallery: this Duchamp’s, and Dada’s, most notable contribution to art history. Later conceptual artists tried with less success to extend the idea, for instance, making a coffee stain on a carpet in the artist’s apartment in 1968 into work of art. Since the carpet no longer exists, however, the stain cannot made special in the way that is accomplished by a gold frame or made special in the way that is accomplished by a gold frame plinth under spotlights.
8. Expressive individuality. The potential to express individual personality is generally latent in art practices, whether or not it is fully achieved. There is no doubt that is expressive of the artist’s individuality, artistic individuality in the way that canonical painting does. As much as canonical painting, however, Fountain and the other ready-mades have generated a literature on Duchamp and what he meant these works. In that sense, they are as open-ended and vague as traditional art objects, and subject to endless interpretation. They provoke curiosity among critics and historians about the qualities of the artistic mind that produced—or presented—these objects.
9. Emotional saturation. In varying degrees, the experience