In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Reed Altemus
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>I agree sometimes the widespread admiration of Duchamp is hard to fathom.
>After all, a l,ot of his most important work was puns and wordplay in
>French which I totally don't get.
Priceless.
Let me explain: there are 100 million plus francophones, who, of
course, can get it. That's enough for admiration to become widespread.
>But certainly the importance of his
>invention of the readymade can't be underestimated.
Yup.
With you there.
It could be regarded as the three-dimensional artistic equivalent of the
camera: extending the ability to become an artist to everybody, but in
three dimensions as well as two. Fully contemporaneous with a mass
production zeitgeist. Fully consonant with a mass culture volkgeist.
And that, of course, is what makes Fluxus so important: part of
extending the possibility of being an artist to those who find the
camera too difficult, or the selection of found objects too challenging.
I applaud these successive democratisations wholeheartedly.
The Internet is the latest: extending the ability to be a 'Sunday
painter' into the verbal/conceptual, and allowing the creation of global
networks of homespun obscurantism, contributed by part-time hobbyist
wannabe conceptual artists.
I love it.
I honestly believe that Internet-driven vanity publishing of (all forms
of) art will kill, once and for all, the elitist dogma that divides
mankind into performer and audience.
Priceless.....
Gerald O'Connell
http://www.wonderport.com
