Fountain By George Shallows

807 Words2 Pages
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Recommended: Nudity in art history

Human beings have an individual belief system generated with own distinctive perception, which alters to produce opinions on certain facts. Today, we are usually provided with some identical standards in order to explore the truth behind a fact. However, at the same time, different factors may confuse us to authenticate the exact standard, finally causing the diversity of opinions. Accordingly, two knowledgeable experts may also have disagreement based on the same facts. In the field of art, it’s always difficult for experts to have a standard for judging art. And simultaneously in history, there are no exactly precise judgments on the past events since on one really experienced the past time. Throughout these two areas of knowledge, we are …show more content…

Duchamp’s “Fountain” was an influential artwork, which was designed to poke fun at American avant-garde art . It was a toilet originally and consisted of urine. George Bellows, a leading artist of a realist persuasion, was outraged by this artwork while a young artist was surprisingly in love with “Fountain”. Bellows complained that “Fountain” was indecent and could not be exhibited. These two experts had a different reaction against the artwork due to their personal experience. Bellows was an experienced realist painter while the young artist was a new blood and his style was too fashion-minded to compare with Bellows’. In this point, personal experience may affect people to be either conservative or grateful to adapt the art piece. If experts involve their personal experience or emotion when generating opinions, it may cause unfairness to the owner of the piece, like the artist of “Fountain” was even disenchanted with the artistic group, thus limit the art creation in our society. Nevertheless, it may even cause ethics violation. Like the nude art does create a moral problem since the social moral tells us that displaying the nude body publicly was wrong. However, for the artists, they subjectively believed that nude art was an expression of human beauty. Therefore, when art allows the artist to be subjective, it may even cause the moral conflict in our

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