Of course Warhol was right in saying that. But there's no necessary causal relationship between artist and artwork. Artists may be those who make things no one needs to have yet those things are not necessarily art. This is the crux of the issue. But the most admired writers on art, like A. Danto, have conflated artist and artwork, following the inane notion of Duchamp who said that something is art if the artist claims it as such. No artist can go beyond proposing something as art. Reception, in all the possible complexities we can devise, determines art.
wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, October 30, 2010 3:45:12 AM Subject: Doesn't the commodification of art begin when people start viewing works of art primarily as gifts? - An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. Andy Warhol* *
