Not true. I can take a walk today and designate whatever strikes my fancy as art, whatever it may be, a scrap in the gutter, a new car, a sign in the shop window, a voice I hear, whatever. Why? Because I'm an artist and whatever I say is art, is art. (For the historical references re this attitude, see Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Robert Rauschenberg's assertion that a note he wrote in answer to a request for a portrait of a dealer was in fact a portrait if that person, "because I say so"). If someone, a dealer, were to trail along with me and pick up or acquire whatever I designated as art on my walk, then that would be the first step in commodifying it. But until that happens, it's still art if I say so, and not commodified. It just remains caught in that zone between art and non-art, depending on who takes my word for it. Again, anything can be art but not anything will be successfully commodified as art. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, January 7, 2012 3:49:42 AM Subject: Re: "...[He} lamented at how art schools exclusively btry to teach the poetry and not the craft.'" On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 5:36 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > ....Proving that anything can be art is not hard or interesting anymore. > What's interesting and hard is proving that > anything can be sold as art. For big prices. Art as capitalism! > - Art in a capitalist society is only available in commodity form. Linton Kwesi Johnson
