Duchamp, 100 Years Later

[continuation:]



There is a useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artifact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that "falls flat." Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke "in bad taste." But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad. Nor does it in any way suggest that there is no place for the criticism of jokes, or for the kind of moral education that has a decorous sense of humor as its goal. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one -- quite a good one first time round, corny by mid-20th century, and downright stupid today.

Works of art, like jokes, have a function. They are objects of aesthetic interest. They may fulfill this function in a rewarding way, offering food for thought and spiritual uplift, winning for themselves a loyal public that returns to them to be consoled or inspired. They may fulfill their function in ways that are judged to be offensive or downright demeaning. Or they may fail altogether to prompt the aesthetic interest that they are petitioning for.


THE WORKS OF ART that we remember fall into the first two categories: the uplifting and the demeaning. The total failures disappear from public memory. And it really matters which kind of art you adhere to, which you include in your treasury of symbols and allusions, which you carry around in your heart. Good taste is as important in aesthetics as it is in humor, and indeed taste is what it is all about. If university courses do not start from that premise, students will finish their studies of art and culture just as ignorant as when they began.

It is true, however, that people no longer see works of art as objects of judgment or as expressions of the moral life. Increasingly, many teachers of the humanities agree with the untutored opinion of their incoming students, that there is no such thing as a distinction between good and bad taste. But imagine someone saying the same thing about humor. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday recount one of the few recorded occasions when the young Mao Tse-tung burst into laughter: it was at the circus, when a tight-rope walker fell from the high wire to her death. Imagine a world in which people laughed only at others' misfortunes. What would that world have in common with the world of Moliere's Tartuffe, of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, of Cervantes' Don Quixote, or Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy? Nothing, save the fact of laughter. It would be a degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found its endorsement in humor, in which one whole aspect of the human spirit would have become stunted and grotesque.

Imagine now a world in which people showed an interest only in Brillo boxes, in signed urinals, in crucifixes pickled in urine, or in objects similarly lifted from the debris of ordinary life and put on display with some kind of satirical intention -- in other words, the increasingly standard fare of official modern art shows in Europe and America. What would such a world have in common with that of Duccio, Giotto, Velazquez, or even C�zanne? Of course, there would be the fact of putting objects on display, and the fact of our looking at them through aesthetic spectacles. But it would be a degenerate world, a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the ideal and the transcendent, but in which we study human debris in place of the human soul. It would be a world in which one whole aspect of the human spirit -- the aesthetic -- would have become stunted and grotesque. For we aspire through art, and when aspiration ceases, so too does art.

Now it seems to me that the public space of our society has in fact begun to surrender to the kind of degradation that I have just described. It has been taken over by a culture that wishes not to educate our perception but to capture it, not to ennoble human life but to trivialize it. Why this is so is an interesting question to which I can offer only an imperfect answer. But that it is so is surely undeniable. Look at the official art of modern societies -- the art that ends up in museums or on public pedestals, the architecture that is commissioned by public bodies, even the music that enjoys the favors of the public subsidy machine -- and you will all too often encounter either facetious kitsch, or deliberately antagonizing gestures of defiance towards the traditions that make art lovable. Much of our public art is a loveless art, and one that is also entirely without the humility that comes from love.


IT DOESN'T FOLLOW that taste and judgment are things of the past. It doesn't follow that art has vanished from our lives or has lost its meaning. All that follows is that art is being driven from the public arena. It is no longer out there that you find it, but in here, in foro intero. Art is being privatized, with each of us striving to remain faithful to visions of beauty that we are no longer confident of sharing outside the circle of our friends. One cause of this is the democratic culture, which is hostile to judgment in any form, and in particular to the judgment of taste. The prevailing attitude is that you are entitled to your tastes, but not entitled to inflict them on me.

Most American students come to college with this attitude, and are appalled to discover that there are people who do not merely disagree with their tastes in music, art, and literature (not to speak of clothes, language use, and social relations) but actually look down on their tastes, as inferior to some putative standard. This is very hard to take, and is one cause of the widespread endorsement of cultural relativism in its many forms -- since cultural relativism simply lifts aesthetic experience out of the world of judgment altogether, and therefore neutralizes good taste as a value. And the preference for art that desecrates the human image or the public space is connected with this fear of aesthetic judgment. By espousing what is deliberately unlovely and unlovable, you make judgment ridiculous, my judgment as much as yours.

It seems to me, however, that the democratic attitude is in conflict with itself. It is impossible to live as though there are no aesthetic values, while living a real life among real human beings. Manners, clothes, speech, and gestures -- all require careful attention to the way things look. In every sphere of human life, from laying a table to giving a funeral speech, aesthetic choices are both necessary and noticed. Without them we cannot solve the vast problem of coordination that arises when a myriad private individuals crowd into a single public space. Hence, in the democratic culture, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as an affliction. It imposes an unsustainable burden, something that we must live up to, a world of ideals and aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the tawdriness and imperfection of our own improvised lives. It is perched like an owl on our shoulders, while we try to hide our pet rodents in our clothes. The temptation is to turn on it and shoo it away.

Here we see another motive for the desire to desecrate. It is a desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself, so that it no longer seems like a judgment of us. This you see all the time in children -- the delight in disgusting noises, words, allusions, which helps them to distance themselves from that adult world that judges them, and whose authority they wish to deny. That ordinary refuge of children from the burden of adult judgment has become the refuge of adults from their culture. By using art as an instrument of desecration they neutralize its claims: it loses its authority, and becomes a fellow conspirator in the plot against ideals.

Shapeless, many thanks for bringing this excellent article to my attention. I've always considered Duchamp and his followers to be clever rascals, but rascals nevertheless. The philosopher/art critic (for the Nation), Arthur Danto, probably considers him--as he does that other rascal, Warhol--to have benefitted art by revealing it to be a branch of philosophy. I see it as a dimension of our sensual/spiritual, not just our intellectual, life.

The importance of taste is properly emphasized in the article. Hypothetically, the greatest possible taste would, to my mind, reflect the sensibility of the greatest possible human being. Yet I consider taste to be relative, as I do cultural systems. The author, Scruton, seems to feel that taste that is not objective and absolute is somehow false or illusory. He says that

"cultural relativism simply lifts aesthetic experience out of the world of judgment altogether, and therefore neutralizes good taste as a value."

How can this be? Different cultures throughout the world and throughout history have developed and enjoyed standards of all kinds of value, including aesthetic value, that have informed their lives very effectively, and these standards have not depended on some absolute source for their effectiveness (even if the cultures believed so). Good taste, even when seen as relative, exists within a social and cultural context of human-made standards. And it is no less real or effective because of it.
But I'm delighted that Scruton put Duchamp and his descendants in bogus contemporary art in their place.

Nice post, JL. <nods>

Thanks for reading it, J.

I'll second Osso's praise... lots of great food for thought here, JLN. I'll try to put together some of my own thoughts soon...

Thanks again. My bottom line here is that something does not have to be absolute or objective to be real. Indeed, for me it is the relativity (relative to my culture and personality) and subjectivity that makes things important. And there is nothing more deeply personal or subjective than art.

I thought kids laughed because something was funny.


Unless it's a conspiracy.

l.h.o.o.q.
she's got a hot ass.

Well said.

I am generally amused at how desperately Scruton needs to believe that the aesthetic value of the artworks he worships is an objective fact. The only alternative to this, apparently, is extreme relativism: either we believe Beethoven's Fifth is objectively great, or we are committed to believing that art doesn't exist. What is it about the idea of social contingency that Romantics (to refer to it by the aesthetic culture that gave birth to the idea) find so threatening? it is telling that philosophers of art never think to ask whether the artists they venerate subscribed to the same belief in aestheticism (by which I mean the belief that art can have no other purpose than to be contemplated) that they themselves insist on. It would take the barest minimum of historical investigation to show that the near-sanctity with which we approach art now is only about 150 years old. And I don't doubt that Scruton knows this, but I can understand his silence on the matter: if we ignore historical circumstances, then we never have to investigate the motives behind artistic creation; and if we never investigate motives, then we can more easily believe that art just is, that it responds to no demands save its own.

I don't mean to sound so crotchety; to a certain extent I can understand why someone would want to believe in this admittedly beautiful, utopian vision. But I find that owning up to our entirely self-imposed premises is even more liberating. I would much rather believe that Beethoven's Fifth is great because people--nay, entire cultures--have believed it to be so, rather than because the abstract principle of aestheticism has deemed that we must believe it so. I'll go so far as to say that this latter view demeans art (not to mention people) much more than Duchamp ever did.

Both absolute objectivism, which denies the constructed nature of human experience and reality, and the absolute relativism that trivilizes all such constructions fail to appreciate the value of humanity's capacity for designing and enJOYing its existence. Art is one of our great constructions for achieving this purpose. According to Stendhal beauty is a promise of happiness.
I see my life as a relativistic phenomenon but one that is, as I said, rooted in my cultural and personal nature: and THEY exist absolutely--i.e., they are real. Indeed, it's an objective-absolute fact that all the content of our experience is subjective-relative.

Duchamp did not become one of the paragons of modern art just because his visual pun of the urinal -- it was the range of his creative ability which did stress intellectual approaches to art as a philosophy rather than the highly emotional and often beautiful in its fullest semantic implication. Trying to cubbyhole any one artist and especially Duchamp and Warhol is really futile because the body of their work cannot be duplicated without being an faux imitation. Duchamp entered the pantheon of modern art with the Armory Exhibit and "Nude Descending the Staircase," about as far away from the intended imagery of the urinal as you can get. That painting had the core of abstract expressionism hidden in its slashing lines and jarring, out-of-place colors.

Yes, Duchamp was questioning what is art and what is not. His conclusion is that if the artists says its art, its art. That doesn't mean its good art or not an imitation (influences of artist of the past notwithstanding). If someone took a Kohler toilet and placed it on the ceiling and entitled it "The Showerhead," or "The Helmet," it would not be good art as it would be an obvious imitation of "The Fountain." That idea that an everyday object can be turned into something where one doesn't relieve themselves but drinks out of is cynical humor and a statement that artists cannot afford to be as pretentious or arrogant as, say, a businessman.

The end result of "The Fountain" is not the Campbell Soup cans and Brillo boxes which were an early imagery of Warhol, but rather Jeff Koons who IS a businessman. Unfortunately, despite the notoriety of Mr. Koons, he's tried to do the same thing as Duchamp and it's like too little, too late.

Artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were highly influenced by Duchamp but did not imitate him. Their found objects found themselves swimming in a picture plane of abstract expressionism and the cerebral became an ally of the emotional.

The essay approaches being a diatribe against conceptual and pop art. It reads like it might have been written at the time of the Armory Show where, remember, Duchamp's futurism in "Nude Descending a Staircase" was dubbed "an explosion in a shingle factory."

Duchamp's immense influence on modern art is unmistakable, but that's not to say that all of the art that is inspired by some of Duchamp's creations is good art. That's personal opinion, of course, and only subjective. One cannot impose an objectivism viewpoint on any art.

There never was an artist like Duchamp nor will there ever be again.

Mr. Wizard. I have come to appreciate abstracts because of JLN's delightful work, but realism is still wonderful. Can you honestly tell me that this is saying something to us?



I really think Duchamp was putting us on, just as Beckett's "Breath" did.

I am certain that you are familiar with Francis' Bacon's work, and I see something in his paintings.

Duchamp wasn't putting us on, or maybe rather putting on the art world, anymore than Boccioni even though Duchamp hadn't unplugged cubism entirely from his early work.

Duchamp "The Bride"




Boccioni "Dynamacism of a Soccer Player"

Exception for colorways, Duchamp's later works bear little resemblance to the urinal, his Mona Lisa or "Nude Descending the Staircase."



The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

It's interesting that Duchamp was such a technically proficient and innovative painter, before venturing into other materials.

Later in his life, he was approached by the go-between Man Ray with an offer to produce a single painting a year for a dealer in New York (with its attendant remuneration). Duchamp said "Non!" He had done what he wanted to do in painting.

I could bear (sic) his reasons for retirement.

I agree that Duchamp had immense talent--and, in a way, a degree of intellectual genius--but his contribution to art as I understand and appreciate it has been mostly negative. After him much of contemporary conceptual poop art has been "silliness." I greatly appreciate his Nude and other parallel works of that time, and I actually like the orginality of his Bride...work. But most of the occassions when I encounter a pile of something taking up valuable gallery floor space I tacitly curse Duchamp as well as Warhol. Someday we will recover from their influence, an influence that was fun for a while--like much of John Cage's cleverness--but now: enough! enough!

I do love the Staircase, but from my outsider view, I see a PR world glomming on to something and then lemmings following.

Now, sometimes I can get behind those changes. I don't mean that I'm against glomming on to Duchamp, but that the glomming, or the gloaming (there was this old song), shuts off other systems in the intellectual world.

Artists in groups in school and just out seem titsuckers, or define themselves as opposite.

I think a lot is being missed, worldwide and even relatively locally, because of a system needing, for various reasons, to pick one, or, oh, two modes.



I don't mind thrusts of interest. It is the shutoff of ELSE that makes me wonder.

(I'm aware there is a giant amount of dreck out there, but I guess I'd like some open-ness to range of expression..)

Osso, I too take a pluralistic position regarding art. The more avenues taken the better. Maybe what I dislike is the pervasive influence* of Duchamp, that he HAS shut off many other possibilites, produced too many "titsuckers", causing much to be missed.
But I also dislike the hyperintellectualization of art. To me art taps much more than intellect (hence my lack of enthusiasm for Cage); it taps much deeper, far more primitive aspects of the psyche.

*Other influences like the automatism of surrealism, expressionism, cubism, the art brut of CoBRa, etc. were more definite. They contributed something which we could identify and later both incorporate and transcend. But the cynical intellectualisms of contemporary "theorists" has been too general and counter-PRODUCTIVE. They've generated nothing of the sublimity of real art. Forgive my subjectivity; but that's what art is.