The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [110]
On a numerical calculation of items on the cluster criteria list, not mention the overwhelming agreement of generations of art theorists and art historians, the answer is a resounding “Yes, Fountain is a work art.” Duchamp’s readymades nevertheless incite fierce debate because they so deeply and effectively challenge our evolutionary response-system art: where’s the emotion, the individuality, the skill, the beauty? Duchamp set himself not only against culture but against the adaptive structure of art. Yet there it is on a plinth, an object of no special interest made into an object of the most special attention. Can this be course not, and yet it must be, as the experts continue to insist. philosophical provocations about art, the readymades are intellectual masterpieces. For its part, Fountain may not be pretty, but as an art-theoretical gesture, it is a work of incandescent genius.
Fountain is also inimitable, which puts in a curious light Simon Wilson’s comment that the readymade “has finally taken off.” To the contrary, it took off long ago with Duchamp, who flew it with wit and style. historical perspective, his readymades have in their po-faced neutrality definite humor and charm. But like jokes that can only be laughed once, having been done, they cannot be done again with anything like Duchampian impact. Haydn invented the string quartet, and it could take off” in the hands of Beethoven and Schubert: that’s what it is pioneer an art form. It is a mistake to think of the readymade in same way.
This hasn’t stopped any number of lesser artists from trying to again and yet again Duchamp’s subversive act. The imitations reached rock bottom in 1961 with Merda d’artista, a series of works produced, in every sense of the word, by the Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni. In fact, in 2002 the Tate Gallery paid $61,000 to add to collection Can 004 from Manzoni’s series of ninety cans of his own tinned in May 1961.” Manzoni had undertaken many other projects, including signing hard-boiled eggs and declaring Umberto Eco a work art, but even he may have been surprised by the success of selling own excrement. As Manzoni explained, “If collectors really want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit. That really is his.”
According to Manzoni’s friend Enrico Baj, the ninety cans were “ an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism.” Man-zoni was also opposed, Baj claimed, to “empty and formal manifestations of the dominant culture” of art, of a bureaucracy of the beautiful. The trouble is that by now such gestures as Merda d’artista have long since been accepted by the institutional bureaucracy of art. This nowhere more clear than in the Tate Gallery’s official response to journalists’ questions about the 2002 Manzoni acquisition. Can 004 was very important purchase for a very small amount of money,” a spokeswoman said. Manzoni “was an incredibly important international artist. What he was doing with his work was looking at a lot of issues that pertinent to twentieth-century art, like authorship and the production art.” She then added, without a hint of irony, “It is a very seminal work.” Not that too!
The Tate’s humorless defense of its acquisition contains a sad lesson the decline and fall of the readymade. The readymades were objects perceptively presented by Marcel Duchamp to an art world that was incapable of appreciating their wit or his irony; the solemn reaction made them all the more amusing and effective. Since 1917, the originally clever idea of the readymade has spread through the