Modernism & Art

Dollar books at the Strand book store, 23/10

I've gained acceptance into the university of my choice, and as easy as it is for me to mourn this delay of action and retreat into a sort of nostalgic stupor of should haves, should have nots, and the like, I must remind myself the momentous progress that has been made, emotionally and intellectually. My ability to sincerely communicate with other people has increased, and I , primarily, attribute that to my psychic development in analysis and my close friend, K. I was excited to find this book of dialogues with Marcel Duchamp; Duchamp was the quintessential modernist who confronted the passive spectator with the following question, by which standards and definitions are we to hold when judging an object that is attached with the title “art”?

Has art been relegated to be the content of elitist banter or does the value lie in its ability to stimulate aesthetic pleasure in the senses? Duchamp’s “The Fountain” is literally a urinal with a signature on it; he did not build it, as it is a “ready-made”; this means, there are probably many of the same exact urinals that exist in the world; what makes this art, if it was not produced by the artist himself, nor does it , I assume, stimulate any significant emotion in the spectator. What this does, in my opinion, is alters our former assumptions on the purpose of art and for what end, it pursues. One normally associates art with being emotionally engaging or simply, nice to look at; The Fountain , however, is what Harold Rosenberg terms, an "anxious object" by which extricates the spectator from his or her habitual modes of perception, and presents art as a force that cannot easily fulfil the exigencies of mundane life, but requires alternative interpretations and contains values, independent of its exchange rate or market price. 

This does not remove the restrictions of art in any way, as some claims modern art does, but, from my perspective, it allows art to divorce itself from its intended expectations imposed by bourgeois cultural standards and the advancing market economy, and gain a form of autonomy as a non-commodified political statement that is not available for immediate consumption. The false signature, portrays Duchamp's disdain for the "careerism" of the art world; it also, rids art's illusion in its reitified state, as an object containing quasi-mystical properties, by demonstrating how art can be made out of anything; the notion of art is, thus, shaped by how we perceive it and how quickly we identify it as such.

An interesting aspect of art is one can view the historical progression, the underlying conflicts of ideological discourse by which these works of art are built, but although, we can trace back the varying movements that these pieces are products of, we cannot predict the direction its heading or by what motor it’s moving. Art's function has changed dramatically throughout each epoch by which it is visibly symptomatic of antagonistic historical forces at work, striving to gain or regain dominance over that of the other. The avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century presented a means of artistic expression free from the bureaucratic artificiality of rising capitalism and the technological advances often associated. 
 
To return to a more personal note, I’ve rarely found myself emotionally moved by works themselves, but when I am able to attach a historical context correspondent with it; I can then, began to think, respond, and react appropriately. This is obviously not an ideal method of “artistic appreciation”, and you can probably make the argument that I am not really “appreciating” art but only the theoretical framework it is subsequently placed in (basically, i’m appreciating everything but the actual work of art itself).