46:05 "Her lips press right up against the underside of her nose squashing her black mustache, but it may be her bulbous chin that makes looking at this painting an exercise in aesthetic self-abuse. I could go on." My reply is please do. I haven't laughed that hard in a minute. I am really looking forward to part two!
Your Jackson’s pollock video was enlightening and the first I saw of yours, and I immediately subscribed and watched all your videos, and found them all fascinating. This video is no exception. I’m an art quilter, and over in the quilt realm folks are still concerned with technique and skill and vision. Even though a lot of quilts are tacky, the art coming out of the quilt world is honest and mostly free of hack conceptual bullshit.
This is so good. It's the kind of takedown that conceptual art really needs. I was a student of Gary Kennedy the "near-legendary figure in the Canadian conceptual art scene." His Intermedia class taught me everything I needed to know about conceptual art. Things like how to use body language to project a sense that you're important, how to deflect valid questions with a sneer, how to sit in a chair in a way that makes you look like everyone else's intellectual superior. The deflection that critics of conceptual art "just don't get it" really needs to be deflated. I get it, I just don't respect it.
Damn dude. You should have started this with the clip from Un Chien Andalou. Because while I've never bought into the hype around Duchamp's urinal or readymade art, this really opened up my eyes!
You make this subject so appealing and the comparison with Monet is pretty neat. I directly see the "real" and the "fake" one. Also, I had the same reflection when I looked at Wikiart of Rothko's figurative artwork. Duchamp and him can easily compete for the most ugly face made in art history. Special mention for his self-portrait. Looking forward for the part 2!
Duchamp's art foretold the wreckless, machine death about to visit Europe and the rampant nihilism to follow. Is this what the glorious industrial revolution had brought? Theres no inspiration or light - only endless, mechanized death. Duchamp's legacy has been that every modern search of his name displays many urinals and spoke bicycle wheels. I dont know how he'd feel about that - maybe that was his point? (As usual, thank you for creating a thoughtful, interesting video - I very much enjoy your work.)
On second thought - there was probably no art ESP involved. My paternal ancestors had already left Yugoslavia by 1914. Perhaps everyone could see the dark handwriting on the wall?
Duchamp reminds me of The Menu (movie, 2023). There's room for everyone in art, but at the end of the day, the conceptual stuff leaves most of us hungry and unsatisfied, and kind of stressed. I don't like it when artists present work that doesn't invite me to engage with it so much as force me to do the labor of unpicking whatever meaning is in there with very little direction or support. Sometimes I want the artistic equivalent of a cheeseburger and fries to go for 9.95 - which will surely be better the more skilled the artist, but a man cannot live on esoteric commentary on the art market alone. I'm not gonna claim that Conceptual Art Bad, but it does have a major issue with pretension and illusions of depth. Caravaggio was also an ass, but he had the chops to back it up and a lot of the Dada and conceptual artists don't display much in the way of skill or finesse.
I'm sure I've seen an interview where he's actually sorry for creating Fountain due the crap that followed. It was just meant as a piss take - pun intended.
@artvsmachine3703 funnily enough, your redundant umlaut in "Küns" would make the pronunciation of your pseudonym more like "k-euuggh-ns", as if the person saying it is trying not to vomit, which I think is rather appropriate!
I watched this couple of hours ago. I have never heard of this guy's conceptual interventions but they're great! This video inspired me to upload my own take on the urinal/fountain which I made a while back but lost heart as my channel went up then nosedived into the abyss. I've a similar view to this one albeit more off the cuff and rough n ready and with a bit of a twist. I really learned something here as I was under the impression Duchamp had mastered painting but obviously not. Good to see this kind of content!
Anything fake, such as the "money" that you speak of, requires being tied to at least some granule of substance at first, for it to attain believability. While "real money" relies on an underlying energy, and therefore generates trust (rather than belief), the fake money that gets introduced into a monetary system over time, such as in ours, makes the substance which it is based on, more expensive. In other words: that, which has intrinsic value, such as food or land, becomes less accessible (if one tries to attain it through the system). Regardless of art definitions: that, which constitutes much of which is considered pre-modern art - craft and labour - has undergone a dramatic devaluation in the minds of a majority of people in the so-called "west" since roughly 1750. Interestingly, the uber-wealthy patrons of the modern "arts" still value craft and expertise enough, to not fill their houses with IKEA furniture, nor do they resist displaying Caravaggios in their sublimely-made interiors.
I'm a scientist so I have no idea what I'm talking about or you're talking about, but it does strike me as interesting that so many people derived this meaning from his work, even though it seems to not really align with what he was trying to do. Like, as a casual art viewer, there have definitely been so called "readymades" I've seen exhibited that have made me reconsider the beauty and function and nature of common objects in a new light, definitely not a neutral feeling. And I think there are probably meaningful things to be said using that methodology, like I'm thinking of Deleuze & Guattari deterritorialization type stuff, or like... defamiliarization and Brechtian distancing/alienation effect techniques, which he used very deliberately and with specific sociopolitical commentary and philosophical aims. But I buy your point that was not what Duchamp himself was doing, and seems to have genuinely just been disgruntled with art I guess? And looking at some of the Koonses and Hirsts you presented in the video, they seem somewhat soulless... I get the vibe that he probably was like "screw art I hate these guys they're so pretentious" and so did the fountain, but then as soon as he started getting positive feedback and press and there was suddenly potential for profit from the art world and he was like "oh wait.... art is good actually" and walked back his "I hate art" stance and started going with the "I hate... overly constrained definitions of art..." thing. But I guess I will have to wait for part 2 to find out
This channel definitely makes content that is more interesting and thought-provoking than the majority of art criticism channels. I think in this video, I disagree with some of the points you make, but agree with others. I actually don't mind Duchamp, but I'll agree that a lot of what people say about him is utter crap and Jeff Koons absolutely sucks ass.
On a popular video streaming site I use there is only one artist available for viewing and his name is Bob Ross . .I lost interest in "Art" many years ago.
The spurious attempts to link Warhol, an enthusiast, 'in love with the modern world' a la Jonathan Richman to M. Douchechump, an Aristo Cynic and failed painter is a complete and deliberate misreading akin to maintaining that the 'kitchen chair with Bicycle wheel' was considered as an alternative to the combustion engine, for transportation and industry. All the conceptual posse think, 'machine production' is a sort of elevated concept, and not the platitude that Duchamp never did anything with over the course of a long life devoted to playing chess and Master of ceremonies of chess clubs and competitions. He succeeded in 'doing away' with art, which he said he abandoned after 1917, and even won a few chess tournaments. How much he was 'inspired' by resentment of his elder brother the acknowledged preeminent painter of La France he disenfranchised by changing his surname to Duchamp...and even more by his loathing of Picasso...who rocked up in Paris in 1900, and La France was blowing Teutonic Bratwurst after 1914...a combination of humiliations that might sour nostalgia for belles époques with 'horizontal collaboration' to an individual who embodied 'Resentement' (Nietsche's ape) with a fist full of full blooded ulterior motives...of wounded pride, and emasculation as man , nation and once aspiring artist from a culturally preeminent family, and a very sore arse, having been used in a multiple BBC clusterf&ck curtesy of Big Brother, Prodigious Pablo P and then the 'superior' Aryan invaders with Tanks and Bullets.( produced by machines) watched the German tanks racing to close down the airport (latterly Charles De Gaulle... la France) from which 'Marshsmell Douchechump' escaped on the second to last airplane, as refugee with all on board suffering loose bowels .......and all these powerful life-changing events, be they traumatic or humiliating, were permanently formative, but were never going to be admitted or addressed, but soon to be 'avenged' in a 'conceptual death potion' in which the brother, Picasso, and ther baton of expressionism..once French..soon to be German -(based) were suddenly erased...by our vengeful, M.Duchamp...whose elevated conceptual mind would not stoop to trifles like pivotal moments of European History and not one Art Historian would ever consider trifles like the annexation of France, or the fact all 4 of his brothers had been wounded at the front and imminent threats to his sister's virtue worthy of our hero's consideration. as he sensed Charlton Heston was coming.. ....all matter of the balls not the bowels...though a 'urinal' doesn't 'cope' with a full, honest evacuation, and deep down, or 'Up' Marcel should have enshrined the bidet as his 'core' object / avatar as soothing to a wounded sphincter and mouthpiece to all the conceptual cobblers soon to be spread by the mostly French Philosophes/ Historians the traumas of 1914 just one of multiple 'texts' in which pissoirs not panzers are displayed in the hurt locker. As far as I know Marcel was never beaten the sh*t out of by the vengeful women who took bloody revenge on those horizontal collaborators, but spitting in the face of non enlisted single men was within their conceptual vocabulary what with all the dead sons and husbands unworthy of mention in a triumphalist art History where they may talk sh*t but it smells of p*ss. Over to you Jeff..(Koons) ..Marcel's exit, as the future Charles de Gaule airport was getting shut down is true, as indeed the wounded brothers.. and I believe the hate crime 'round the hood' all facts ..the bike wheel on chair still is a crap 'piece' and the erasure of expressive modernism, then flowering a monstrous ingratitude, and the exclusion of enormous events from the account as causes of ulterior motivation...'Je suis La France' Charlton Heston or Charles de Gaule? Or Marcel Duchamp..Meat or minge. 'Duchamp was the son of an (upper middle class) notary and the younger brother of the painter Jacques Villon and the Cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon.'
For those millions moved to the core by the 'Kitchen chair with Bicycle wheel' mentioned in the previous...or the masterly 'Snow shovel'...these legendary works were made prior to his timely exit before all travel.. even by 4 legged monocycle was curtailed by the Wehrmacht, in a pioneering 'performance'. Fortunately for us all, they had been shipped off to the USA as a lasting testament to his contribution to the war effort, without the life changing injuries suffered by his siblings in frontline combat. I had a pdf of Duchamp's chess career with his own statements on 'doing away with art after 1917...having been enthusiastically received in the USA where Snow shovels were soon the height of fashion. Despite the apparent 'cancellation' or 'redundancy' of dullard Modernism, Picasso's 'ready made' /found object 'Bull's head' of bicycle saddle and handlebars really raised the bar in the field, just a Guernica put Nude descending a staircase to shame...the nude is about 2ft 6'' of dead end, while Picasso did hundreds of life sized studies for Guernica..all of which are amazing.
Picasso's Bull's Head is the great found object art piece of the century, hands down. The childlike novelty and synchronicity, while being the only person to think of it, despite the simplicity, proves his ultimate genius. If Dali hadn't had a terribly undeveloped oeuvre of sculpture, you might be able to say he was his equal, but Dali's sculptures suckity suck(IMHO). Despite the crudity, despite his unwillingness to develop any refined spiritual paintings because his delusion that he was an atheist, when he obviously wasn't exactly, considering he was highly superstitious, Picasso...bulldozes them all. Like a short little bull man in a Chinashop of pretension and confusion in the wake of the Nietzschean death of god.
The bull's head comes long after the urinal. But I'm with you, Picasso is an obviously huge talent which is evident in scores of his better works. Duchamp is dry and dusty at his best. The fact that by now everyone prized Duchamp over Picasso is utter inanity.
@@mazolab Yay Mazolab, ,,,well you nailed that Dude! ..your comment. Picasso Addressing an audience in the same game, who have done a bunch of still life works 'if you want red apples in your picture, but they only have green ones in the market, well, paint them red!' Picasso gives you the open road and confidence to attempt invention from the ground up , alreadyin your skill set. The action adventure science fiction 'convulsive' still life works ....who Duchamp's cheerleaders might say ; 'baubles for the bourgeoise' were all posing as rebels to the capitalist hegemony, and so the piss pot by Frenchie a mighty blow to a debilitated 'capitalist thingy' anxious to impose acdemic realism...tho Duchamp an elite old curmudgeon whose photo ops with proletariat the fever dreams of those who soon would delight in empty galleries as further 'resistance' A socialists' Trojan Horse. hence the smell of equine manure. Clement Greenberg's Avant Garde & Kitch begins with a blacking up socialist 'method' then a hand brake turn into disenfranchising the entire working class condemned to comic books as the blanket bombing not yet online for the Eugenicists dressed as socialists milling about. The urinal as a kick in the goolies of the Zeitgeist...elevated to the heroic Mais oui! Doing some art..and will be putting the Charlton Heston amongst the critics soon
Did anyone note the reports in the last year or two, that the urinal was sent to Duchamp by a female artist to be exhibited in the salon des Independants, in Paris. This lady, was a Louise Bourgeoise type to whom sewage systems and human waste/ urology had a visceral, profound significance. The reports suggested he didn't dare exhibit HER work despite his curatorship of the intended group show achieved through nepotism. Other members of the board of the 'salon' objected, so, instead M.Duchamp took it the the US and exhibited it as his own... in a commendable masterstroke of 'authorship' which is the concept employed when engaged in a dastardly rip off of another's work...and for whom the thing had real significance and who was deprived of any recognition for gifting him the idea.. although it had no intrinsic meaning for Duchamp. Uncharitable 'appropriation' and 'authorship' by concealing the real 'author. The conceptual cultists would say, Huh! Personalities!
All the best of luck to you on your quixotic attempt to single-handedly take down Marcel Duchamp. This is quite a project. As I've stated before, I am a visual artist so towing into writing is always an issue for me. Here's my two cents anyway. As you point out there's a well-established narrative to Duchamps works. I think it's great that you point out in his early career how poor of a painter he was. I also wholeheartedly agree about some of the terrible artworks being done by contemporary artists who are aping Duchamp. I don't pay much attention to them because I think it's just trash. I personally feel that it is somewhat undeniable that Duchamp took art to another realm as a reaction. And once an artist's artwork becomes a valuable commodity and has a storyline, it's very difficult to overcome that...certainly after more than a hundred years. For me, there's a certain sense of playful surprise in works like Bicycle Wheel, The Bride Stripped Bear by Her Bachelors Even (The Large Glass), The Fountain, Hat Rack, and L.H.O.O.Q. I always spend time at Yale University's Art Gallery when I'm there to look at Tu m'. I experience an inventive and intellectual curiosity in Duchamp's work. I do also find an inventive intellectual curiosity in your own work, which I certainly appreciate! I look forward to part two of this project. You have certainly spent considerable time analyzing and thinking deeply about Duchamp. I applaud your integrity! Cheers -Greg
Thanks, but wait, you actually think putting a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa is anything other than juvenile spite? Oddly enough, Duchamp has proved his own theory that anything, any art, that is put on a pedestal and seen long enough will be validated. It's like the word "iconic". I wrote an article years about about how I don't like "iconic" because "iconic" has come to just mean whatever is crammed down our throats. That's how I feel about Duchamp. When I first discovered his stunts, they bored me to tears. But over decades, now that are hard-wired into my brain. But it's total BS in my book. But, yeah, he did some mildly clever things, and even some genuinely second-rate works, which is something of an achievement. But unless someone would rather have his "comb" than a Van Gogh, all is gilded BS on a platter. And I think that was rather his point in his readymades.
@@artvsmachine Your probably right. Maybe I'm still a bit juvenile. The letters below his mustached Mona Lisa roughly translate to, 'She has heat in her pants.' I wouldn't consider that serious art, but funny to me anyway. Cheers -Greg
I like Duchamp's spinning machines and discs but Moholy-Nagy was just as good if not better than Duchamp. Plus he produced a bunch of wonderful abstract paintings. I don't quite understand the fixation on the Fountain. It seems to me that the Large Glass and Given are much more interesting works. No doubt his reputation is overblown but he was still quite an interesting artist. Probably the greatest Dadaist of them all. I never took his ideas about discrediting art seriously. However, it is possible that modern technology like AI will finally destroy art along with everything else. Just take a look at what is going on over at Deviant Art and you'll find a lot of completely dehumanized art. It all looks the same and it is certainly lacking the human touch.
I agree with you about which are Duchamp's best works, and in the proper perspective I also agree that he's "interesting", though perhaps less interesting than Moholy-Nagy who most people have never heard of. I also prefer Man Ray aesthetically. As a curiosity on the periphery of art I'm fine with Duchamp. The Large Glass has novelty and represents an ambitious attempt at a new kind of art. It's all a bit dull and dreary for my tastes, but I can appreciate it in the proper context. That's all find and good. Y'know, I like DEVO, but if they were celebrated as on par with Beethoven and the best music of the last half-century, I'd take serious issue. It is the extraordinary elevation and exaggerated praise of Duchamp -- and especially the urinal -- and the effect this has had on art and thinking about art, that is so utterly insipid and repugnant. I think you are wrong about AI. You are correct that in the hands of the multitude the result is an absolute deluge of mediocrity, and the effect on DA or NFTs has been brutal. We can say the same about the effect of smart phone cameras and photography. Now, everyone is a photographer. But that's not the best way to look at it. Think of it this way. An artist can type something and get an image. An artist can then animate that image, and assemble resulting images in a timeline. And artist can add narrative, music, and sound effects. Now, a creative person can produce music videos and movie trailers using just their laptop. The potential for creative exploration is off the charts. I just started making videos using AI last month. Contrary to people's numb-brained, knee-jerk, face-planting assumptions and the hate they are throwing my way, it requires more time, energy, intelligence and creativity than most anything else I've ever done. I started with music videos (also created the music) and expanded into movie trailers to get practice. But of course I've introduced novel elements and take it further than most. Later on I'll make short films, as well as a lot of fun and experimental stuff. Few will find my work in the avalanche of pure crap and the fail-safe mediocrity corporations will churn out to take over the medium and the venues. But I, for one, will be doing highly creative, experimental, meaningful, and transcendent work with the medium. Those who oppose me are, well, from my perspective, stupid and have no genuine understanding of art. Oh, and the idea that AI art lacks humanity makes sense in terms of rhetoric and expectation, but that need not be true in the slightest. Check out all the AI vids I've done so far in that last 6 weeks. If you don't change your mind, you are being one stubborn SOB: ruclips.net/video/WPyBBs9cYmM/видео.html
@@artvsmachine I'm not completely opposed to AI art actually. I've made about 500 images using Dal-E text to image program. I used images from my poems and dream records and at least 100 of them are quite good. But I do feel I need to do something more with them As it is making those is just not as satisfying as painting or making collages. I have picked up some ideas for modifying them from watching your videos though. I have this biography of Duchamp called The Bachelor Stripped Bare by Alice Goldfarb Marquis. She is more critical of Duchamp than most of the literature and she calls him a dilettante at one point and points out his lack of skill as a painter, at least in his pre-cubist period. But Moholy-Nagy is my current favorite. Man Ray, Ernst, Miro, are among my favorite artists. A new one, whom I discovered through your channel, is Gerhard Richter. His paintings are fantastic.
Well, for example, you could take one of your poems or dream records, make multiple images using AI (and you'd have to do serious culling), and then animate them (which is really a lot of hit and miss), and you could make a video for your entire poem or dream record. Once you get that involved with that many decisions and revolve it around something personal, it requires quite a lot of time, effort, and creativity. Ah, glad you like Richter. Bacon is probably my favorite 20th century artist.
So…no-talent artist Marcel Duchamp takes his frustrations out on the art establishment of 1917 by demonstrating that, well, _anything_ can be art-and, single-handedly, if inadvertently, creates “conceptual art”-and then, you ingeniously subvert that, with your _Andro-gene, by Damien Hirst_ and _Sigmund the Sea Monster Dong_ pieces, by asking, “Well, anything, really?,” even, say, Jeff Koons’s “aggrandized boring-ass kitsch.” (The “by Damien Hirst” is complete brilliance not only for coöpting the name of the artist in any mention of the work but in stating plainly what the work _is.)_ It’s anti-conceptual art masquerading as conceptual art and it’s all pretty amazing. Your videos are, too.
OK. I can't reveal a joke in the middle of it, but I feel a little bad if people fall for my hoaxes. People who know me from my blog, going back a decade, know my conceptual pieces are hoaxes. So, there's layers of pranking. But "The Art Assignment" really did fall for the one and put it in there video right next to Duchamp.
@@artvsmachine Oh, now I feel dumb. (Not that I had any doubts but the article in _New York_ magazine 27:45 would have clinched it if I had.) Somehow the hoax aspect makes the critique even better, even if I was fooled. Still love the videos, of course.
@artvsmachine3703 Well, you're right about there being a certain level of pretention that goes into the romanticism of "the fountain," but i disagree with you on 2 things 1: duchamp's lack of technical proficiency as the catalyst for his abandonment of figuration...You showed two pieces he painted of the same woman and critiqued the "hands" of one of the first piece, implying duchamps inability to render hands, but in the second piece the hands seem just fine, this is just an instance by the way. I just feel it's more of artistic liberty than lack of technical skills....Even with the "ugly profiles," there's a bit of inconsistency , some look right, others dont... which leads me to believe it's the artist exercising his liberties. 2: The context in which duchamp's readymade sculptures fall in.... if im not mistaken, duchamp was operating not in isolation but rather within the dadaist movement, which i believe you're familiar with... and both "the fountain" and "the wheel"( which he made 3 years prior) were a step forward in the direction of the anti art establishment dadaist movement, there most likely are other artists with similar ideas around that time working within the confines of dada that had limited visibility....
I could have gone on and on and on about all his ineptitudes at painting. The comparison of his seascape to Monet's alone is devastating. It's ineptitude masquerading as artistic liberty. Marcel was notoriously lazy by his own admission, and particularly when this came to painting, which is why he just didn't have the skills that come through hard-earned practice. THAT my friend is the hard existential truth of the matter, where you like it or not. I"m well aware of Dadaism, but didn't choose to go into it. I find it rather dreary. My focus is on the overvaluation of the fountain. I assume you don't agree with Jerry Salz that it's on par with the Copernican revolution and is akin to the birth of Christ??
Watch the video again someday. You missed a lot. And I have another half hour or so of it I can release, but I've moved on to doing my creative work instead.
""Money can't buy taste," but that doesn't stop blue chip galleries from selling it." - ME
46:05 "Her lips press right up against the underside of her nose squashing her black mustache, but it may be her bulbous chin that makes looking at this painting an exercise in aesthetic self-abuse. I could go on." My reply is please do. I haven't laughed that hard in a minute. I am really looking forward to part two!
Your Jackson’s pollock video was enlightening and the first I saw of yours, and I immediately subscribed and watched all your videos, and found them all fascinating. This video is no exception. I’m an art quilter, and over in the quilt realm folks are still concerned with technique and skill and vision. Even though a lot of quilts are tacky, the art coming out of the quilt world is honest and mostly free of hack conceptual bullshit.
This is so good. It's the kind of takedown that conceptual art really needs. I was a student of Gary Kennedy the "near-legendary figure in the Canadian conceptual art scene." His Intermedia class taught me everything I needed to know about conceptual art. Things like how to use body language to project a sense that you're important, how to deflect valid questions with a sneer, how to sit in a chair in a way that makes you look like everyone else's intellectual superior. The deflection that critics of conceptual art "just don't get it" really needs to be deflated. I get it, I just don't respect it.
Thanks. I have another half hour I might share. I'm needing a break from this.
@@artvsmachine no worries, looking forward to the next part!
Damn dude. You should have started this with the clip from Un Chien Andalou. Because while I've never bought into the hype around Duchamp's urinal or readymade art, this really opened up my eyes!
So, I was in a colleague's bathroom in Paris; and there it was, a genuine Duchamp! I tell you that guy had artwork everywhere.
p r o l i f i c
You make this subject so appealing and the comparison with Monet is pretty neat. I directly see the "real" and the "fake" one. Also, I had the same reflection when I looked at Wikiart of Rothko's figurative artwork. Duchamp and him can easily compete for the most ugly face made in art history. Special mention for his self-portrait. Looking forward for the part 2!
Thank you for your subversion of the Duchampian conception and especially the Levitating Mass improvement. Hats off to you!
Stay tuned for Part 2, which is more devastating.
Very enjoyable!
Personally, I always stop to admire urinals whenever I use a public lavatory.
I love how the piece, when re-hung that way will dump urine back onto the urinator. Now it becomes an interactive piece.
Great! Looking forward to more.
Duchamp's art foretold the wreckless, machine death about to visit Europe and the rampant nihilism to follow. Is this what the glorious industrial revolution had brought? Theres no inspiration or light - only endless, mechanized death.
Duchamp's legacy has been that every modern search of his name displays many urinals and spoke bicycle wheels. I dont know how he'd feel about that - maybe that was his point?
(As usual, thank you for creating a thoughtful, interesting video - I very much enjoy your work.)
On second thought - there was probably no art ESP involved. My paternal ancestors had already left Yugoslavia by 1914. Perhaps everyone could see the dark handwriting on the wall?
best takedown of duchamp ive seen since Miles Mathis
Great job, this video is pure gold!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Another masterpiece!
Looking forward to Part 2 :)
Duchamp reminds me of The Menu (movie, 2023). There's room for everyone in art, but at the end of the day, the conceptual stuff leaves most of us hungry and unsatisfied, and kind of stressed. I don't like it when artists present work that doesn't invite me to engage with it so much as force me to do the labor of unpicking whatever meaning is in there with very little direction or support. Sometimes I want the artistic equivalent of a cheeseburger and fries to go for 9.95 - which will surely be better the more skilled the artist, but a man cannot live on esoteric commentary on the art market alone. I'm not gonna claim that Conceptual Art Bad, but it does have a major issue with pretension and illusions of depth. Caravaggio was also an ass, but he had the chops to back it up and a lot of the Dada and conceptual artists don't display much in the way of skill or finesse.
Damn, this was a trip. :D
That was excellent. Is there a part two?
looks like it's brand new, and maybe part two needs some time to finish. Im waiting eagerly.
There's another 30 minutes I've complete so far of Part 2.
I'm sure I've seen an interview where he's actually sorry for creating Fountain due the crap that followed. It was just meant as a piss take - pun intended.
I think that this B letter is read as two 's' characters. Grussman would be the name
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I don't speak any German.
Yes, it’s not a B but a ß which is called an _eszett_ or _scharfes_ (sharp) S. (I don’t know German but I know of the letter.)
@artvsmachine3703 funnily enough, your redundant umlaut in "Küns" would make the pronunciation of your pseudonym more like "k-euuggh-ns", as if the person saying it is trying not to vomit, which I think is rather appropriate!
I watched this couple of hours ago. I have never heard of this guy's conceptual interventions but they're great! This video inspired me to upload my own take on the urinal/fountain which I made a while back but lost heart as my channel went up then nosedived into the abyss. I've a similar view to this one albeit more off the cuff and rough n ready and with a bit of a twist. I really learned something here as I was under the impression Duchamp had mastered painting but obviously not. Good to see this kind of content!
Modern art is exactly like money. It requires belief to make it valuable.
Anything fake, such as the "money" that you speak of, requires being tied to at least some granule of substance at first, for it to attain believability. While "real money" relies on an underlying energy, and therefore generates trust (rather than belief), the fake money that gets introduced into a monetary system over time, such as in ours, makes the substance which it is based on, more expensive. In other words: that, which has intrinsic value, such as food or land, becomes less accessible (if one tries to attain it through the system). Regardless of art definitions: that, which constitutes much of which is considered pre-modern art - craft and labour - has undergone a dramatic devaluation in the minds of a majority of people in the so-called "west" since roughly 1750. Interestingly, the uber-wealthy patrons of the modern "arts" still value craft and expertise enough, to not fill their houses with IKEA furniture, nor do they resist displaying Caravaggios in their sublimely-made interiors.
I'm a scientist so I have no idea what I'm talking about or you're talking about, but it does strike me as interesting that so many people derived this meaning from his work, even though it seems to not really align with what he was trying to do. Like, as a casual art viewer, there have definitely been so called "readymades" I've seen exhibited that have made me reconsider the beauty and function and nature of common objects in a new light, definitely not a neutral feeling. And I think there are probably meaningful things to be said using that methodology, like I'm thinking of Deleuze & Guattari deterritorialization type stuff, or like... defamiliarization and Brechtian distancing/alienation effect techniques, which he used very deliberately and with specific sociopolitical commentary and philosophical aims. But I buy your point that was not what Duchamp himself was doing, and seems to have genuinely just been disgruntled with art I guess? And looking at some of the Koonses and Hirsts you presented in the video, they seem somewhat soulless...
I get the vibe that he probably was like "screw art I hate these guys they're so pretentious" and so did the fountain, but then as soon as he started getting positive feedback and press and there was suddenly potential for profit from the art world and he was like "oh wait.... art is good actually" and walked back his "I hate art" stance and started going with the "I hate... overly constrained definitions of art..." thing. But I guess I will have to wait for part 2 to find out
Gappa looks like a pretty good film.
I love the smell of Photoshop in the morning...
Ah yes. Indeed.
This channel definitely makes content that is more interesting and thought-provoking than the majority of art criticism channels. I think in this video, I disagree with some of the points you make, but agree with others. I actually don't mind Duchamp, but I'll agree that a lot of what people say about him is utter crap and Jeff Koons absolutely sucks ass.
On a popular video streaming site I use there is only one artist available for viewing and his name is Bob Ross . .I lost interest in "Art" many years ago.
Love this!
The spurious attempts to link Warhol, an enthusiast, 'in love with the modern world' a la Jonathan Richman to M. Douchechump, an Aristo Cynic and failed painter is a complete and deliberate misreading akin to maintaining that the 'kitchen chair with Bicycle wheel' was considered as an alternative to the combustion engine, for transportation and industry. All the conceptual posse think, 'machine production' is a sort of elevated concept, and not the platitude that Duchamp never did anything with over the course of a long life devoted to playing chess and Master of ceremonies of chess clubs and competitions. He succeeded in 'doing away' with art, which he said he abandoned after 1917, and even won a few chess tournaments. How much he was 'inspired' by resentment of his elder brother the acknowledged preeminent painter of La France he disenfranchised by changing his surname to Duchamp...and even more by his loathing of Picasso...who rocked up in Paris in 1900, and La France was blowing Teutonic Bratwurst after 1914...a combination of humiliations that might sour nostalgia for belles époques with 'horizontal collaboration' to an individual who embodied 'Resentement' (Nietsche's ape) with a fist full of full blooded ulterior motives...of wounded pride, and emasculation as man , nation and once aspiring artist from a culturally preeminent family, and a very sore arse, having been used in a multiple BBC clusterf&ck curtesy of Big Brother, Prodigious Pablo P and then the 'superior' Aryan invaders with Tanks and Bullets.( produced by machines) watched the German tanks racing to close down the airport (latterly Charles De Gaulle... la France) from which 'Marshsmell Douchechump' escaped on the second to last airplane, as refugee with all on board suffering loose bowels .......and all these powerful life-changing events, be they traumatic or humiliating, were permanently formative, but were never going to be admitted or addressed, but soon to be 'avenged' in a 'conceptual death potion' in which the brother, Picasso, and ther baton of expressionism..once French..soon to be German -(based) were suddenly erased...by our vengeful, M.Duchamp...whose elevated conceptual mind would not stoop to trifles like pivotal moments of European History and not one Art Historian would ever consider trifles like the annexation of France, or the fact all 4 of his brothers had been wounded at the front and imminent threats to his sister's virtue worthy of our hero's consideration. as he sensed Charlton Heston was coming.. ....all matter of the balls not the bowels...though a 'urinal' doesn't 'cope' with a full, honest evacuation, and deep down, or 'Up' Marcel should have enshrined the bidet as his 'core' object / avatar as soothing to a wounded sphincter and mouthpiece to all the conceptual cobblers soon to be spread by the mostly French Philosophes/ Historians the traumas of 1914 just one of multiple 'texts' in which pissoirs not panzers are displayed in the hurt locker. As far as I know Marcel was never beaten the sh*t out of by the vengeful women who took bloody revenge on those horizontal collaborators, but spitting in the face of non enlisted single men was within their conceptual vocabulary what with all the dead sons and husbands unworthy of mention in a triumphalist art History where they may talk sh*t but it smells of p*ss. Over to you Jeff..(Koons) ..Marcel's exit, as the future Charles de Gaule airport was getting shut down is true, as indeed the wounded brothers.. and I believe the hate crime 'round the hood' all facts ..the bike wheel on chair still is a crap 'piece' and the erasure of expressive modernism, then flowering a monstrous ingratitude, and the exclusion of enormous events from the account as causes of ulterior motivation...'Je suis La France' Charlton Heston or Charles de Gaule? Or Marcel Duchamp..Meat or minge. 'Duchamp was the son of an (upper middle class) notary and the younger brother of the painter Jacques Villon and the Cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon.'
love your contant
For those millions moved to the core by the 'Kitchen chair with Bicycle wheel' mentioned in the previous...or the masterly 'Snow shovel'...these legendary works were made prior to his timely exit before all travel.. even by 4 legged monocycle was curtailed by the Wehrmacht, in a pioneering 'performance'. Fortunately for us all, they had been shipped off to the USA as a lasting testament to his contribution to the war effort, without the life changing injuries suffered by his siblings in frontline combat. I had a pdf of Duchamp's chess career with his own statements on 'doing away with art after 1917...having been enthusiastically received in the USA where Snow shovels were soon the height of fashion. Despite the apparent 'cancellation' or 'redundancy' of dullard Modernism, Picasso's 'ready made' /found object 'Bull's head' of bicycle saddle and handlebars really raised the bar in the field, just a Guernica put Nude descending a staircase to shame...the nude is about 2ft 6'' of dead end, while Picasso did hundreds of life sized studies for Guernica..all of which are amazing.
Picasso's Bull's Head is the great found object art piece of the century, hands down. The childlike novelty and synchronicity, while being the only person to think of it, despite the simplicity, proves his ultimate genius. If Dali hadn't had a terribly undeveloped oeuvre of sculpture, you might be able to say he was his equal, but Dali's sculptures suckity suck(IMHO). Despite the crudity, despite his unwillingness to develop any refined spiritual paintings because his delusion that he was an atheist, when he obviously wasn't exactly, considering he was highly superstitious, Picasso...bulldozes them all. Like a short little bull man in a Chinashop of pretension and confusion in the wake of the Nietzschean death of god.
The bull's head comes long after the urinal. But I'm with you, Picasso is an obviously huge talent which is evident in scores of his better works. Duchamp is dry and dusty at his best. The fact that by now everyone prized Duchamp over Picasso is utter inanity.
@@mazolab Yay Mazolab, ,,,well you nailed that Dude! ..your comment.
Picasso Addressing an audience in the same game, who have done a bunch of still life works 'if you want red apples in your picture, but they only have green ones in the market, well, paint them red!' Picasso gives you the open road and confidence to attempt invention from the ground up , alreadyin your skill set. The action adventure science fiction 'convulsive' still life works ....who Duchamp's cheerleaders might say ; 'baubles for the bourgeoise' were all posing as rebels to the capitalist hegemony, and so the piss pot by Frenchie a mighty blow to a debilitated 'capitalist thingy' anxious to impose acdemic realism...tho Duchamp an elite old curmudgeon whose photo ops with proletariat the fever dreams of those who soon would delight in empty galleries as further 'resistance' A socialists' Trojan Horse. hence the smell of equine manure. Clement Greenberg's Avant Garde & Kitch begins with a blacking up socialist 'method' then a hand brake turn into disenfranchising the entire working class condemned to comic books as the blanket bombing not yet online for the Eugenicists dressed as socialists milling about. The urinal as a kick in the goolies of the Zeitgeist...elevated to the heroic Mais oui! Doing some art..and will be putting the Charlton Heston amongst the critics soon
Keep up the good work. Conceptual art is stale and self defeating. New vistas of beauty and meaning shall be visible beyond its grave.
Bravo!
Did anyone note the reports in the last year or two, that the urinal was sent to Duchamp by a female artist to be exhibited in the salon des Independants, in Paris. This lady, was a Louise Bourgeoise type to whom sewage systems and human waste/ urology had a visceral, profound significance. The reports suggested he didn't dare exhibit HER work despite his curatorship of the intended group show achieved through nepotism. Other members of the board of the 'salon' objected, so, instead M.Duchamp took it the the US and exhibited it as his own... in a commendable masterstroke of 'authorship' which is the concept employed when engaged in a dastardly rip off of another's work...and for whom the thing had real significance and who was deprived of any recognition for gifting him the idea.. although it had no intrinsic meaning for Duchamp. Uncharitable 'appropriation' and 'authorship' by concealing the real 'author. The conceptual cultists would say, Huh! Personalities!
Much has been written about the Baroness Elsa, she's quite a surrealist icon by now...
@@mazolab Glad to hear it.
I think Duchamp is always winking at us
A true believer.
Epic😮
All the best of luck to you on your quixotic attempt to single-handedly take down Marcel Duchamp. This is quite a project.
As I've stated before, I am a visual artist so towing into writing is always an issue for me. Here's my two cents anyway. As you point out there's a well-established narrative to Duchamps works. I think it's great that you point out in his early career how poor of a painter he was. I also wholeheartedly agree about some of the terrible artworks being done by contemporary artists who are aping Duchamp. I don't pay much attention to them because I think it's just trash.
I personally feel that it is somewhat undeniable that Duchamp took art to another realm as a reaction. And once an artist's artwork becomes a valuable commodity and has a storyline, it's very difficult to overcome that...certainly after more than a hundred years.
For me, there's a certain sense of playful surprise in works like Bicycle Wheel, The Bride Stripped Bear by Her Bachelors Even (The Large Glass), The Fountain, Hat Rack, and L.H.O.O.Q. I always spend time at Yale University's Art Gallery when I'm there to look at Tu m'. I experience an inventive and intellectual curiosity in Duchamp's work.
I do also find an inventive intellectual curiosity in your own work, which I certainly appreciate! I look forward to part two of this project. You have certainly spent considerable time analyzing and thinking deeply about Duchamp. I applaud your integrity! Cheers -Greg
Thanks, but wait, you actually think putting a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa is anything other than juvenile spite? Oddly enough, Duchamp has proved his own theory that anything, any art, that is put on a pedestal and seen long enough will be validated. It's like the word "iconic". I wrote an article years about about how I don't like "iconic" because "iconic" has come to just mean whatever is crammed down our throats. That's how I feel about Duchamp. When I first discovered his stunts, they bored me to tears. But over decades, now that are hard-wired into my brain. But it's total BS in my book. But, yeah, he did some mildly clever things, and even some genuinely second-rate works, which is something of an achievement. But unless someone would rather have his "comb" than a Van Gogh, all is gilded BS on a platter. And I think that was rather his point in his readymades.
@@artvsmachine Your probably right. Maybe I'm still a bit juvenile. The letters below his mustached Mona Lisa roughly translate to, 'She has heat in her pants.' I wouldn't consider that serious art, but funny to me anyway. Cheers -Greg
Jerry Saltz is a hack
agree
I like Duchamp's spinning machines and discs but Moholy-Nagy was just as good if not better than Duchamp. Plus he produced a bunch of wonderful abstract paintings. I don't quite understand the fixation on the Fountain. It seems to me that the Large Glass and Given are much more interesting works. No doubt his reputation is overblown but he was still quite an interesting artist. Probably the greatest Dadaist of them all. I never took his ideas about discrediting art seriously. However, it is possible that modern technology like AI will finally destroy art along with everything else. Just take a look at what is going on over at Deviant Art and you'll find a lot of completely dehumanized art. It all looks the same and it is certainly lacking the human touch.
I agree with you about which are Duchamp's best works, and in the proper perspective I also agree that he's "interesting", though perhaps less interesting than Moholy-Nagy who most people have never heard of. I also prefer Man Ray aesthetically. As a curiosity on the periphery of art I'm fine with Duchamp. The Large Glass has novelty and represents an ambitious attempt at a new kind of art. It's all a bit dull and dreary for my tastes, but I can appreciate it in the proper context. That's all find and good. Y'know, I like DEVO, but if they were celebrated as on par with Beethoven and the best music of the last half-century, I'd take serious issue. It is the extraordinary elevation and exaggerated praise of Duchamp -- and especially the urinal -- and the effect this has had on art and thinking about art, that is so utterly insipid and repugnant.
I think you are wrong about AI. You are correct that in the hands of the multitude the result is an absolute deluge of mediocrity, and the effect on DA or NFTs has been brutal. We can say the same about the effect of smart phone cameras and photography. Now, everyone is a photographer. But that's not the best way to look at it.
Think of it this way. An artist can type something and get an image. An artist can then animate that image, and assemble resulting images in a timeline. And artist can add narrative, music, and sound effects. Now, a creative person can produce music videos and movie trailers using just their laptop. The potential for creative exploration is off the charts. I just started making videos using AI last month. Contrary to people's numb-brained, knee-jerk, face-planting assumptions and the hate they are throwing my way, it requires more time, energy, intelligence and creativity than most anything else I've ever done. I started with music videos (also created the music) and expanded into movie trailers to get practice. But of course I've introduced novel elements and take it further than most. Later on I'll make short films, as well as a lot of fun and experimental stuff. Few will find my work in the avalanche of pure crap and the fail-safe mediocrity corporations will churn out to take over the medium and the venues. But I, for one, will be doing highly creative, experimental, meaningful, and transcendent work with the medium. Those who oppose me are, well, from my perspective, stupid and have no genuine understanding of art.
Oh, and the idea that AI art lacks humanity makes sense in terms of rhetoric and expectation, but that need not be true in the slightest. Check out all the AI vids I've done so far in that last 6 weeks. If you don't change your mind, you are being one stubborn SOB: ruclips.net/video/WPyBBs9cYmM/видео.html
@@artvsmachine I'm not completely opposed to AI art actually. I've made about 500 images using Dal-E text to image program. I used images from my poems and dream records and at least 100 of them are quite good. But I do feel I need to do something more with them As it is making those is just not as satisfying as painting or making collages. I have picked up some ideas for modifying them from watching your videos though. I have this biography of Duchamp called The Bachelor Stripped Bare by Alice Goldfarb Marquis. She is more critical of Duchamp than most of the literature and she calls him a dilettante at one point and points out his lack of skill as a painter, at least in his pre-cubist period. But Moholy-Nagy is my current favorite. Man Ray, Ernst, Miro, are among my favorite artists. A new one, whom I discovered through your channel, is Gerhard Richter. His paintings are fantastic.
Well, for example, you could take one of your poems or dream records, make multiple images using AI (and you'd have to do serious culling), and then animate them (which is really a lot of hit and miss), and you could make a video for your entire poem or dream record. Once you get that involved with that many decisions and revolve it around something personal, it requires quite a lot of time, effort, and creativity.
Ah, glad you like Richter. Bacon is probably my favorite 20th century artist.
a joke
8:50
wutaboudit?
@@artvsmachine Nothing. Just timestamp for me to note where to resume watching :)
@@artvsmachine When is part 2 coming out. This was great video
Been taking a break from art criticism and doing my own art. Taking a lot of flack for it from the old fogies here who don't like new art.
So…no-talent artist Marcel Duchamp takes his frustrations out on the art establishment of 1917 by demonstrating that, well, _anything_ can be art-and, single-handedly, if inadvertently, creates “conceptual art”-and then, you ingeniously subvert that, with your _Andro-gene, by Damien Hirst_ and _Sigmund the Sea Monster Dong_ pieces, by asking, “Well, anything, really?,” even, say, Jeff Koons’s “aggrandized boring-ass kitsch.” (The “by Damien Hirst” is complete brilliance not only for coöpting the name of the artist in any mention of the work but in stating plainly what the work _is.)_ It’s anti-conceptual art masquerading as conceptual art and it’s all pretty amazing. Your videos are, too.
OK. I can't reveal a joke in the middle of it, but I feel a little bad if people fall for my hoaxes. People who know me from my blog, going back a decade, know my conceptual pieces are hoaxes. So, there's layers of pranking. But "The Art Assignment" really did fall for the one and put it in there video right next to Duchamp.
@@artvsmachine Oh, now I feel dumb. (Not that I had any doubts but the article in _New York_ magazine 27:45 would have clinched it if I had.) Somehow the hoax aspect makes the critique even better, even if I was fooled. Still love the videos, of course.
Yeah, the purpose is to prove that I get the Fountain. A multi-layered prank on the art world is a tactic to use against a prank on the art world.
You are right and also wrong
You are right about me being right and wrong about me being wrong. You wanna' debate what you disagree with me on?
@artvsmachine3703 Well, you're right about there being a certain level of pretention that goes into the romanticism of "the fountain," but i disagree with you on 2 things
1: duchamp's lack of technical proficiency as the catalyst for his abandonment of figuration...You showed two pieces he painted of the same woman and critiqued the "hands" of one of the first piece, implying duchamps inability to render hands, but in the second piece the hands seem just fine, this is just an instance by the way. I just feel it's more of artistic liberty than lack of technical skills....Even with the "ugly profiles," there's a bit of inconsistency , some look right, others dont... which leads me to believe it's the artist exercising his liberties.
2: The context in which duchamp's readymade sculptures fall in.... if im not mistaken, duchamp was operating not in isolation but rather within the dadaist movement, which i believe you're familiar with... and both "the fountain" and "the wheel"( which he made 3 years prior) were a step forward in the direction of the anti art establishment dadaist movement, there most likely are other artists with similar ideas around that time working within the confines of dada that had limited visibility....
I could have gone on and on and on about all his ineptitudes at painting. The comparison of his seascape to Monet's alone is devastating. It's ineptitude masquerading as artistic liberty. Marcel was notoriously lazy by his own admission, and particularly when this came to painting, which is why he just didn't have the skills that come through hard-earned practice. THAT my friend is the hard existential truth of the matter, where you like it or not.
I"m well aware of Dadaism, but didn't choose to go into it. I find it rather dreary. My focus is on the overvaluation of the fountain. I assume you don't agree with Jerry Salz that it's on par with the Copernican revolution and is akin to the birth of Christ??
Watch the video again someday. You missed a lot. And I have another half hour or so of it I can release, but I've moved on to doing my creative work instead.
@@artvsmachine okay mehn