Even to those void of a formal art background, the world of traditional art is a realm held in high regard by nearly all. This elevation of art and artists is engrained into our culture, evident even in our own language – with common phrases such as ‘a work of art’ or ‘masterpiece’ used to express utmost skill and admiration. Yet, when asked to define art most would be clueless as where to begin, other than to perhaps describe feelings of awe at the skill of artists. However, admiration is a subjective matter so is clearly not a solid foundation for such a definition. To truly explore the definition of art, a fitting example would be to examine the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp and his famed ‘readymades.’ By placing these ordinary articles of life under the spotlight of a gallery, Duchamp shattered the traditional process of producing art that had existed for centuries, and subsequently triggered thinking about what constitutes as art.
These famed readymades are ordinary manufactured objects that Duchamp selected and barely modified, as a contrasting statement to what he called “retinal art” – art that is purely visual. Creating these pieces involved a bare minimum degree of interaction between the artist and artwork, hence forming the most extreme form of minimalism up to that period (1915) . The term ‘readymades’ was coined for these pieces, as this was a commonly used term in the US at the time to distinguish manufactured goods from hand crafted goods - an assurance that the outputs of industrial life would be a fruitful resource in works of art. However, Duchamp’s submissions of his readymades as art to art juries and the public were largely rejected by jurors or went unnoticed in art shows. This was especially the...
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The exhibition of recent stoneware vessels by Peter Voulkos at Frank Lloyd Gallery featured the sort of work on which the artist established reputation in the 1950s. The work was greeted with stunned amazement. However now it is too, but it's amazement of a different order -- the kind that comes from being in the presence of effortless artistic mastery. These astonishing vessels are truly amaising. Every ceramic artist knows that what goes into a kiln looks very different from what comes out, and although what comes out can be controlled to varying degrees, it's never certain. Uncertainty feels actively courted in Voulkos' vessels, and this embrace of chance gives them a surprisingly contradictory sense of ease. Critical to the emergence of a significant art scene in Los Angeles in the second half of the 1950s, the 75-year-old artist has lived in Northern California since 1959 and this was his only second solo show in an L.A gallery in 30 years.”These days, L.A. is recognized as a center for the production of contemporary art. But in the 1950s, the scene was slim -- few galleries and fewer museums. Despite the obscurity, a handful of solitary and determined artists broke ground here, stretching the inflexible definitions of what constitutes painting, sculpture and other media. Among these avant-gardists was Peter Voulkos.” In 1954, Voulkos was hired as chairman of the fledgling ceramics department at the L.A. County Art Institute, now Otis College of Art and Design, and during the five years that followed, he led what came to be known as the "Clay Revolution." Students like John Mason, Paul Soldner, Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston, all of whom went on to become respected artists, were among his foot soldiers in the battle to free clay from its handicraft associations.
What does the work consist of? Who authored it, and how? What is it based on, and how does it relate? What is it, and what will become of it? The answers to these questions, collectively, form an important response to a bigger question: What is art? What does it mean to describe a piece as “a work of art”?
Duchamp’s piece was not controversial because of the simplistic nature of the piece, nor the oddity of it- it was controversial because he had not made it himself. People were very opposed to this idea because they believed that art was something made and not found. Duchamp’s “ready-made” art, which were always mass produced objects made by machines, was offensive to them and so they rejected it wholeheartedly. Unlike Fountain, Kandinski’s Little Pleasures was not rejected because of the nature of its ’creation’, it was rejected because people had never before seen art with such a lack of recognizable forms. Before Kandinski, art had always had representations of things from life, and Little Pleasures seemed almost completely arbitrary to them with no connections to the world they lived in. As such, both pieces were, at first, denied the title of “art” because society was unable to break from tradition and admire something
Artists are masters of manipulation. They create unimaginably realistic works of art by using tools, be it a paintbrush or a chisel as vehicles for their imagination to convey certain emotions or thoughts. Olympia, by Manet and Bierstadt’s Sierra Nevada Mountains both are mid nineteenth century paintings that provide the viewer with different levels of domain over the subject.
The ‘unintelligible’ works of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Arnold Schoenberg or Paul Celan have prompted him to wonder how can such art “exert a claim upon us as powerful and as authorative as that of the classical or traditional works” In The Relevance of the Beautiful he says that the arrival of enigmatic art forms, such as abstract and conceptual art, atonal music and hermetic poetry has been a “genuine revolution.” The insisting presence of such works of art has inspired him to ask “how it comes about that the work addresses us.” Gadamer’s hermeneutic is concerned primarily with what it means to understand something whether it is another human being, an artwork or a natural phenomenon. Whereas the unintelligibility of so much of modern art has challenged the validity of the all encompassing hermeneutic understanding he has envisioned, the hold these art forms exerted on viewers have convinced him that they are indeed a communicative event of sorts. Moreover, their unintelligibility does not negate his notion that works of art are indeed a hermeneutic phenomenon. In a genuine, attentive, encounter with art, he suggests, something happens to the perceiver. The object of art addresses the world in its absolute ‘otherness’. It is an authentic event despite being
Similarly, Weitz maintains that artists should always be able to produce something new or different, without the fear that it will not fit under conditions for being a work of art (1956, 32). As a result, individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being a work of art are problematic for Weitz as he believes they lack inclusiveness to avant-garde works. 20th century avant-grade art renounced definitions of art at that time. Weitz states that any definition of art would continue to be renounced as conditions would not be able to accommodate all art works. To demonstrate this, Carroll uses the example of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1999, 211). Several of the earlier definitions of art would have denied that this was a work of art.
Blurring the edge between art and kitsch, pop artist Andy Warhol introduces consumer culture and celebrity cult into museums with his signature characteristics of imitation, repetition, and contrasting colors (Lazzari and Schlesier 2015, 117). His bold representations of flawed mechanic reproduction and obvious lack of abstraction challenge the definition of art and evoke great debate on the value of his artworks. This essay will examine the significance of repetition produced by silk screen printing in creating instant recognition and meaninglessness that generate valuable cultural records and social commemoration of the modern society. Three of Warhol’s most iconic artworks, Campbell’s Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie will be discussed
Pablo Picasso first publicizes found objects in art when he pasted a printed image of chair caning on to his painting Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912. Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, 1913 consisted of a bicycle fork with a front wheel mounted upside down on a wooden stool. Although Bicycle Wheel is considered his first, Duchamp’s most well-known ready-made and possibly his most controversial is Fountain created in 1917. Besides for Duchamp’s ready-mades, other art techniques produced from the Dada movement were; collage, photomontage and assemblage. Picasso’s Bull Head, 1942 continues the trend, the artist stated, “Guess how I made the bull's head? One day, in a pile of objects all jumbled up together, I found an old bicycle seat right next to a rusty set of handlebars. In a flash, they joined together in my head.”
I traveled to New York, New York, the city where Marcel Duchamp created the Crumpled Version from his famous letterpress exhibition, Dada: 1916-1923; Duchamp created Crumpled Version in the year of 1953 using letterpress exhibition catalogue and poster design mediums, inspired by the art movement of Dadaism. I have traveled from Houston to New York with the hopes that I may gain a sense of the culture Duchamp was a part of when he created his artwork Crumpled Version. Duchamp hoped to challenge artistic convention through crumbling this artwork; additionally doing so exaggerated the process of transformation. I flew to New York using American Airlines. The total airfare I was charged was $359.
The question of whether or not there can be a completely objective standard of artistic beauty is quite a controversial topic in contemporary popular opinion. In order to properly understand one's position on art, we may first need to clarify what it means for something to be considered art. Definitions of art have been numerous and, for the most part, unfruitful, yet I will provide a brief background on popular definitions of the course of time in order to provide a proper context for the definition of aesthetic value. The purpose of this essay is to determine the factors which make particular pieces of art beautiful and others not. I will analyse what I consider to be the two major components of aesthetic value, subjective sentiments and
The use of materials to complement a design’s emotional reaction has stuck with the modernist movement. His implementation of these materials created a language that spoke poetically as you move through the structure. “Mies van der Rohe’s originality in the use of materials lay not so much in novelty as in the ideal of modernity they expressed through the rigour of their geometry, the precision of the pieces and the clarity of their assembly” (Lomholt). But one material has been one of the most important and most difficult to master: light. Mies was able to sculpt light and use it to his advantage.
This movement was known as Dada Art in 1913. From his own words Duchamp explained the reason behind the movement as, “I was interested in ideas not merely in visual products”. As an alternative to representing objects in paint, Duchamp began presenting everyday objects themselves as art. He chose mass-produced, commercially available objects designed them as art and applying new titles for the work along with his signature. This type of art became known as “readymade art”. Producing this type of art disrupted centuries of thinking about an artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects, what art should be, and how it should be made. People argued that what Duchamp was producing wasn’t really art and refused it. Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object could be elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.” Which means anything an artist chooses for their work should be regarded
England: Curwen. D'Harnoncourt, Anne and Kynaston McShine. Marcel Duchamp. New York: MOMA, 1973. Hertz, Richard.
...ns something when it imitates nature and delivers facts of history or culture. Art is the exploration of what it is to be alive, to be human and struggling to understand one’s role within society and identity in general. By stretching the limits of what is acceptable, the artist questions preconceived ideas of what is ugly and beautiful, important and unimportant. These ideas in art and society are influenced by the emergence of new technologies that expand human understanding. Since technology improves and human understanding is bolstered by these theories (both philosophical and scientific), then art will always have a place. The artist’s place is to criticize and express the tendencies and attitudes of himself and of society. Even if those feelings are marginalized, their expression makes the audience aware of them, and begs them to ask questions of themselves.
artist: “The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question” (Joyce 185). ‘What the beautiful is’ does not refer to what objects are considered be beautiful, but to the elements that are involved in calling s...