quoted 9 lines For those of you that don't know, duchamp was the man who turned the>For those of you that don't know, duchamp was the man who turned the
>art world upside down by submitting a urinal, signed and turned on it's
>head to a salon. He was criticized at the time, what on earth was this?
>it certainly wasn't art, as far as the experts of the time were
>concerned. But what he did was EXTREMELY important, he established that
>for something to be art, it need not exhibit skill or composition etc,
>etc, but rather that art occurs as soon as an idea, or concept is
>attached to anything, and thus given significance by a person. He opened
>the doors for the abstract expressionist movement. Art has always been a
at the risk of this thread getting too bogged down in avant-garde art... duchamp did not open the doors for the a.e. movement. in fact, he had nothing whatsoever to do with a.e. at all. (or ae, but let's leave that). that was being developed and explored by people like kandinsky and klee... a development from the myriad cubistic styles of the pre-war period (and of course duchamp himself ripped off the futurists for one of his most famous works, Nude Descending...). it can even be traced back as far as whistler and monet in the late 19th century. duchamp, whose works also included a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel and an infamously-mustachio'd mona lisa, paved the way for warhol and more recently the conceptualists, who haven't so much been inspired by duchamp as just repeated what was essentially a one-off statement about the nature of art.
but there's a difference when it comes to music: who wants to listen to intellectual pontification? at least emin's bed (for example), despite its worthlessness, only takes a few seconds to observe. no one would listen to its equivalent for 5 minutes... instead there needs to be some aesthetic to render it interesting. of course there are no rules... but without an audience what's the point?