New Art - a sketch

Up until Marcel Duchamp: The worldly – art is a craft. Wealthy people and the church commission artists.

After Duchamp: Ideas – art is a pose. Wealthy people and institutes commission artists.

The Anti Art

And now what? Can we continue on this path where artists behave like children, do not possess any craft, are not even able to translate their ideas, so that there now exists a world of thousands of ‘artists’ who basically work for themselves, solely for their own gratification.

There must be another way of making art, translating ideas. There must be art out there which still has any depth, which doesn’t resonate with superficiality.

First a bit of history. Duchamp’s Legacy

Marcel Duchamp showed the way to a new kind of art. Compared with the varieties of visual expression that came before, this new art seeks to to engage the imagination and the intellect instead of just the eyes, embraces humor as a valid aesthetic component, and strives to portray invisible worlds instead of just visible ones.

Some of the most fruitful influences in modern art, from Surrealism to Abstraction to Pop to pure Conceptualism, have a common forefather in Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp grew disillusioned with what he called “retinal art” after 1912, he wanted to create a new kind of art, one which would engage the mind. He constructed conceptual art.

And therein lies one of the problems of ‘modern’ art. Conceptual art was fresh and new in the 1920’s, but almost a century later, it has become something you can study at an art academy. It has almost become a craft. It has become a gimmick. There is no experiment in it. It is indistinguishable from what children can come up with and produce in staggering amounts.

The essence of Duchamp’s art is of course the realization that all art is

a)      In the eye of the beholder

b)      In the mind of the maker

We are all our own mind. Our minds construct the world around us in our own minds.

Duchamp: whether some other things which are presumed to be absolute — namely, artistic conventions of beauty and craftsmanship — might also be merely arbitrary.

We need a breath of fresh air in art. And after that we need new art!