On Apr 8, 2008, at 11:51 AM, William Conger wrote:
I think Derek is right except that the Urinal and the Brillo Boxes are not artworks in the same sense as a painting by Picasso or Titian. They are instruments of anti-art. It's not what they are as art but what they do to the concept of art that matters. They remind us that the object is not the art but can absorb our projections of what art is. The Urinal and the Brillo Boxes reject our projections because they can't be distinguished from the "commonplace", unless of course we are trained to regard the degree of aforesaid rejection as the measure of art. The more a proposed art object rejects our projected regard of it as art, the more art it really is.
"Fountain" was a coup de thiatre, a declaration of the license of names. But what Duchamp did is not like what Warhol did. Who ever mistook the Brillo Boxes as found objects? They were painted to look like their model, but they are clearly not actual cardboard boxes with steel-wool pads in them. It was the banality of their models that was the crucial factor in their succhs de scandale. Moreover, Warhol's boxes were *made* to look nearly identical to their models. He didn't just buy a box and put it on a plinth. The Brillo Boxes have more in common with Johns' Ballentine or coffee cans than with "Fountain." I don't see Warhol's works as instruments of anti-art, as "Fountain" was, but a bazooka assault on what remained of the theory of genres, high art decorum, even the vaunted network of "taste" that enveloped artistic sensibilities at mid-century. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
