Art

K

Keith Levenberg

Keith Levenberg
Prof. Loesberg and I have a difference of opinion on whether a urinal is a work of art.

How about a solid gold toilet?

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www.nytimes.com

More specifically, what do we make of the artist's claim that the toi--er, sculpture is only *sometimes* a work of art; specifically, that it "becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call."

If a viewer of the sculpture is unaware of this instruction from the artist and admires the object for its aesthetics without dropping a deuce in it, is it valid for the viewer to assert that he has experienced the artwork? Or does the artist's contrary intent negate that experience? (Put another way, the sculpture is titled: "Maurizio Cattelan: 'America.'" So is it necessary to defecate on the sculpture in order for the statement 'I went to the Guggenheim and saw "Maurizio Cattelan: 'America'"' to be a truthful statement?)
 
First, I didn't say "a urinal" was a work of art, I said that Duchamp's "Fountain," which is indiscernible in terms of its appearance from a urinal is a work of art. That Keith can't tell the difference between these two statements is the real point at issue in this debate.

Second, I would say this object is fairly obviously an artwork, though I do not address the question of whether it is any good as an artwork. I think it is more simply derivative of Duchamp and Warhol than it is doing something different in their vein of art.

Keith's supposedly debunking question about viewing, confuses interpreting the artwork with apprehending it aesthetically. Keith slightly misreads the article, which says that the object only becomes an artwork at the moment it is in use; it doesn't say that any given "viewer" has to use it in order to understand it. It doesn't even say that any given "viewer" has to see someone else use it, only that it becomes the artwork it is intended to be at the moment of use. But let's stipulate Keith's misreading. The situation remains the same. A viewer who interpreted the work without using it according to that reading would be misinterpreting it. He might be appreciating it as a work of art, just not as the work of art the artist intended. As it happens, this is a frequent event in the interpretation of artworks. There is a whole tradition of justifying Duchamp's sculpture as art by speaking of it in the way we speak of Brancusi's gleaming marble abstracts. One who saw "Fountain" this way would be seeing it as art, alright, just not as the artwork Duchamp intended. Although art, as a meaning bearing discourse, always demands interpretation and any aesthetic apprehension of an artwork will also be an interpretation of it, that doesn't mean one can't get the interpretation "wrong" in which "wrong" means not construing it according to the intended meaning of the artist. And, yet, that "wrong" interpretation might very well be a worthy aesthetic apprehension of the artwork.
 
Who's doing the misreading here?

NYT: "becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call"
JL: "becomes the artwork it is intended to be at the moment of use"

The original formulation (which we can allow may not necessarily be an accurate rendition of what the... ahem... artist said) implies that it is not an artwork without someone peeing or pooping in it. The Prof.'s formulation implies that it is still an artwork, just not the intended artwork.
 
Derivative of Duchamp? It's derivative of Magritte -- Ceci n'est pas une toilette.

I suppose the real point of this piece is to confound the old saying that a thing is art if the artist says so. This artist placed unusual conditions on his art in order to test the boundaries.

I say it is safe to ignore the artist. This is frequently done.

Oswaldo, the floor is yours.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Who's doing the misreading here?

NYT: "becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call"
JL: "becomes the artwork it is intended to be at the moment of use"

The original formulation (which we can allow may not necessarily be an accurate rendition of what the... ahem... artist said) implies that it is not an artwork without someone peeing or pooping in it. The Prof.'s formulation implies that it is still an artwork, just not the intended artwork.
Click to expand...

Things we apprehend as artworks are artworks--at least for us. We can no more be mistaken about that than we can be mistaken about feeling pleasure or pain. If we persuade others to apprehend them as the artworks we take them for, they are that for those groups of people. This isn't relativism, it's a phenomenological statement. It doesn't mean we are correct to so apprehend them, if correct means to see the object as it is given to us. If we all started reading Hamlet as a hilarious screwball comedy, it would still be a play, but in some sense it wouldn't be the play Shakespeare wrote. When we take objects from other cultures that those cultures did not intend as artworks and exhibit them as such, the same thing is happening. None of this goes to the pertinence of my response to Keith. If he wants to say that a viewer who misinterprets the work into a different artwork than one the artist intended doesn't see it as the artwork it is but as some other, perhaps imaginary artwork, I fail to see how that claim would be more aesthetically problematic than saying that someone who read Hamlet as a screwball comedy isn't seeing the artwork the play is but some other, perhaps imaginary artwork.
 
Modern art certainly does make it easier for audiences to make interpretive errors and take objects not intended as artworks for artworks and vice versa. It is part of the point of Keith's bugbear Fountain to enable this error and question its significance. But really, imagine an explosion in an art supply shop that by some extraordinarily improbable chain of events caused some paint to fall on some canvas so as to take the form of a beautiful representational painting of the kind I stipulate Keith admires. Now imagine that spattered canvas, which appears to be a representational painting, were displayed without any information as to its provenance. People, including Keith, would not doubt (mis)take it for an artwork. And why would that not be a comment showing the fraudulence of assertomg and the gullibility of believing that representational art was in fact art.
 
I believe you have answered your own question with the stipulation "extraordinarily improbable." That's an understatement. Your hypothetical is in the same ballpark of improbability as a fish, through random mutation, giving birth to a human being.
 
Well, the fish example is biologically impossible, not just highly improbable. But you surely don't think that much more probable artifacts appearing to be representational paintings couldn't be produced by computer programs and 3D printers. And,of course, arbitrary word recombinant programs have long since produced word sequences that look like poetry even to traditionalists. Really the examples of artifacts apprehended as artworks and vice versa should no longer need rehearsing. The painting example, which is also by now a well-trodden one, and not really mine, is merely piquant then others partly because claiming improbability as a problem effectively identifies art with technical skills as the differentiating factor in a way that no one since the Renaissance would assent to. The main point of the thought experiment stands even with high improbability: any artifact no matter it's appearance needs to have been intended as an artwork to be correctly perceived as one and this means that errors will be common but not really theoretically interesting.
 
"...in a way that no one since the Renaissance would assent to." Oh sure, it's not like they knew anything about art in the RENAISSANCE.

(!)

"...any artifact no matter it's [sic] appearance needs to have been intended as an artwork to be correctly perceived as one..." Reasonable enough, but that just makes intent a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
 
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