>Are you perhaps suggesting something about the relative *quality* of R or of
D?<
It entirely depends which way you look at it.
I can't say much about R or D: I've never actually seen any of their
work. I know only of it through reproduction and hearsay: Duchamp to
me is more of a collection of anecdotes: he tried to repeat the
effects of the camera descending a staircase, he signed a urinal for
exhibit, he formed a second hand art dealership with Man Ray and one
or two others, he became a middle ranking chess player, he moved to
the United States and so forth. So Duchamp consists, for me, of brief
broken narrative about relationships to the tradition of fine art
rather than any notion of a body of work as such.
I have been to the Prado and seen works such as Guernica and Las
Meninas in actuality and its a great deal different to seeing
reproductions of them. Just as reading Pevsner's book 'The Leaves of
Southwell' is not the same as going to the Minster repeatedly in
different contexts (I'm near enough to it to have done so).
Best
Dave
2008/5/14 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>:
> <snip>
>
> I guess that in the arts, as in cosmology, in just matter of what way
> you look at Gresham's Law [DB]
> <snip>
>
> Are you perhaps suggesting something about the relative *quality* of R or of
> D?
>
> All creative practices tend, I think, to be subverted either by their
> recognition as Art (the work is occluded) or by their incorporation into
> commerce (the work itself is replaced). This is one form of debasement.
>
> The readymade and its cousins are anomalous because their content is
> denatured. The variables common to art, craft and commodities by which we
> judge both their status and their quality (skill, labour and materials on
> the one hand, and the balance of exchange value versus use value on the
> other) cease to function. You can't use a urinal that's an artwork; on the
> other hand it has none of that Benjaminian *aura* which artworks are _meant_
> to have. When Klein sold zones of 'immaterial pictorial sensibility', on the
> other hand, there was no material functionality and yet, equally, the
> *auratic* was quite clearly out of place in a transaction based upon *use*.
> This is another: the 'debasement in their turn of oppressive (ie reductive)
> categorisations.
>
> One might argue in similar vein that categories such as *working class* have
> really very little currency except to constrain and occlude the subjective
> feeling of how on earth one fits in. It wasn't always thus, but it is now.
>
> Rauschenberg, I should add, belongs in a different kettle altogether: the
> use of choice as a weapon against imposition, certainly, but in the context
> of *junk* (as with Cage and *noise*); also the sheer lusciousness of the
> object; plus the articulation of different levels of perspective that is
> owed, in part, to Hofmann.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
> (Harry Partch)
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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