/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10712623]

who is the Duchamp of literature?

[Anonymous No.10712630]

>>10712623
Milton

[Anonymous No.10712634]

>>10712623
you and your diary desu

[Anonymous No.10712758]

perec

[Anonymous No.10712767]

>>10712623
The dadaist poets. Are you retarded?

[Anonymous No.10712773]

>>10712758
how so?

[Anonymous No.10712781]

>>10712623
Stirner, or rather Duchamp was the stirner of artists

[Anonymous No.10712787]

>>10712781
He is more Nietzsche
>oh me? No I don't go to art shows
I rec Conversations with Duchamp tho

[Anonymous No.10712845]

>>10712623
Not literature but Nietzsche.

Both him and Duchamp are examples of genius so unique, groundbreaking and persuasive, both BTFOing the history of their respective fields and having such a wide influence, that they create a cancerous legacy of pale imitators, lazy pseuds and pontificators to mobilise elements of Duchamp's/Nietzsche's ideas and concepts as means to their own half-formed ends and in justification of the most pretentious pieces of shit such as:
Duchamp: Jeff Koons' readymade Hoovers or Michael Craig-Martin's 'An Oak Tree'...
Nietzsche: 'Reject the land of your forefathers' becomes the Trans debate or moral relativism...

They are almost demonic figures. Theories so subtle that the subtlety is lost in the aesthetic grandeur and is instead comprehended reductively becoming a force of edgy stagnation.

[Anonymous No.10712885]

William Carlos Williams

[Anonymous No.10712965]

>>10712845
>Michael Craig-Martin's 'An Oak Tree'
I just looked this up and its truly terrible. thanks, I feel better about my shit life now because at least I'm not this guy.

[Anonymous No.10713197]

>>10712845
>Nietzsche: 'Reject the land of your forefathers'

what's this from?

[Anonymous No.10713283]

>>10713197
It's a line in Zarathustra

[Anonymous No.10713339]

>>10712787
Duchamp was quite literally influenced by The Ego and It's Own, and he mentioned it amongst the three authors that changed his view on art (the others being Roussel and Diogenes [author-ish I guess])

[Anonymous No.10713973]

>>10712623
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote

[Anonymous No.10714120]

>>10712845
well said

[Anonymous No.10714758]

>>10713197
>>10713283

Then he goes on to say "It is to my childrensland that I look"

but yeah.

[Anonymous No.10714787]

>>10712845
Is there anything more played out than Nietzsche-cocksucking?

[Anonymous No.10714936]

>>10714758
Exactly, but my point is that Nietzsche is cherry-picked and condensed because he's able to say subversive things powerfully in few words. Those quotable lines are then taken as tenets when they are thrown around superficially, rather than just one line in a very complex set of ideas. Hence the general misunderstanding of him outside of serious study and the gigantic meme of him being for lack of better terms the entry level fedora edge lord, God is dead as just a metaphor appealing to daddy issue angst.

[Anonymous No.10714962]

>>10714787
Joyce cocksucking.

[Anonymous No.10716044]

arno schmidt

[Anonymous No.10716164]

>>10712845
I wouldn't relate Nietzsche to Duchamp only because as far as visual art goes, Duchamp produced fucking garbage, whereas as far as philosophy goes, Nietzsche produced, to quote the man himself, "an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up with gold and goodness." I wouldn't say the same about Duchamp for the visual arts.

[Anonymous No.10716233]

Allen Ginsberg amplified and accelerated the postmodern bs in poetry. Now we're stuck getting poet laureates like Juan Felipe Herrera

[Pseudo Intellectual No.10716247]

Brett Easton Ellis is that particular bit of Duchamp in the OP pic.

[Anonymous No.10716263]

>>10716233
Ginsberg is great though

[Anonymous No.10716308]

>>10712845
duchamps garbage is completely in contrary to nietzsche's views on what is good art for starters

[Anonymous No.10716418]

>>10716164
T. Visual arts certified expert opinion

[Anonymous No.10716443]

>>10716418
https://www.artrenewal.org/Article/Title/abstract-art-is-not-art
https://www.artrenewal.org/Article/Title/good-art-bad-art

[Anonymous No.10716505]

>>10712845
You shut your whore mouth Koons' Hoovers and Equilibrium Tanks are great.

[Anonymous No.10716769]

>>10716505
I really don't see it. what is it you like about them?

[Anonymous No.10716777]

>>10716443
>artrenewal.com

[Anonymous No.10716779]

>>10716443
http://www.denisdutton.com/bell.htm

[Anonymous No.10716962]

>>10716164
>>10716308
Ok but if you read my post I am comparing them based on their crude subversive influence, not on the actual content of their work or stances on art.

But as to calling Duchamp shit based on the readymade objects... Nude Descending Staircase he did when he was 25 and the technique and effect were so refined and hybridised that it was rejected by the cubists for being too futurist, the futurists for being too cubist. It is today regarded as exceeding all members of both groups in its quality.

But I feel The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors is his greatest achievement. Look at it and read around it if you care to.

Another thing they have in common is that they cease their successful careers in their respective fields prematurely, Nietzsche due to madness, Duchamp due to chess

[Anonymous No.10716965]

Tzara ?

[Anonymous No.10716984]

>>10716505
Imagine defending Jeff Koons, the absolute state of this place.

If Warhol and Duchamp had had some kind of gay art baby and that baby was then molested by a new age cultist, the result would be Koons. So vapid, but such a great way with words. True rhetorician. I can imagine every time he uses that line 'The Wet/Dry Hoover is very much like Kierkegaard's Either/Or' on banker types they must think him so transcendentally intelligent with his intelligent references and such. He saw them coming.

[Anonymous No.10716990]

>>10716962
>>But as to calling Duchamp shit based on the readymade objects... Nude Descending Staircase he did when he was 25 and the technique and effect were so refined and hybridised that it was rejected by the cubists for being too futurist, the futurists for being too cubist. It is today regarded as exceeding all members of both groups in its quality.
cubists and futurists are both cretins so not much of an achievement

[Anonymous No.10716992]

>>10716962
>The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors is his greatest achievement.

why's that? and what do you think of Étant Donnés?

[Anonymous No.10717047]

Bataille

[Anonymous No.10717053]

>>10716992
I had completely forgotten about that piece. It's definitely up there with his best. Makes me think of the Black Dahlia. A must see for anyone who thinks of Duchamp as simply an ideas man and not a talented painter prior to changing art with his ideas.

As for The Large Glass. I like that it's a very personal work, taking seven years to complete, the wire and dust materials used accumulated on his apartment floor and he collected it up, which is unique, laborious and eccentric in itself. This dirt, dust, scrap metal is used to the effect of representing seduction as a machinic series of processes, with the figures of the bride and her bachelors resembling more so tools than anthropomorphic figures. I think it's a very original penetration of materialism to get to the machinic noumena that hides beneath phenomena. It has an aesthetic that I enjoy and stimulates ideas for me regarding process philosophy, free will, empiricism. Was great seeing the surviving replica recently alongside Dali's work.

[Anonymous No.10717080]

>>10716990
I am by no means a fan of either. But both groups required particular techniques and specific motifs of their artists to be considered 'part of the gang', Duchamp waltzes along at 25 and defies either group and exceeds either group. Whether or not you like cubism or futurism you must admit that, especially creating futurist work and pull it off, requires a lot of skill.

[Anonymous No.10717089]

>>10717053
>>10716992
i love Étant Donnés. I've actually been getting back into aesthetics and art criticism and would love some recommendations about texts on the Big Glass. Tomkins goes into it and Etant Donnés in his Duchamp's biography but he clearly wanted to save material for a future book on both works.

[Anonymous No.10717116]

>stylish as fuck
>women literally threw themselves at him
>hanged around with some of the most influential minds of the 20th century, influenced them while remaining his very own artist up to the end
>1,90m, square jaw, always groomed
>debunked the entirety of western art almost as a joke
>100 years on, 50 years after his death, the art world still hasn't managed to overcome him
>fantastic chess player by all accounts
A übermensch, anyone who dislikes Duchamp should leave this board now and never return. Your mind is not fit for literature if you're a consumer of cheap retinal art.

[Anonymous No.10717118]

>>10717089
Unfortunately I won't be able to recommend you any books regarding Duchamp in a critical sense, but if you haven't watch his BBC interview from the 60s and read Walter Benjamin Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

[Anonymous No.10717123]

>>10712845
>Duchamp: Jeff Koons' readymade Hoovers or Michael Craig-Martin's 'An Oak Tree'...
yeah, those are a couple of examples, but most of art since Duchamp (especially conceptual art) is heavily indebted to him in one way or another.

[Anonymous No.10717127]

>>10717116
Fucking CHAD, found a rich old lady to sexually bait for money while making contacts in high society and selling his lads work to unsuspecting rich people.
>>10717118
I did already, I love Benjy as much as I love Marcel. I'll check the interview though, thanks.

[Anonymous No.10717128]

>>10717116

This is a Kierkegaardian board, not a Nietzschean one. You belong on /b/.

[Anonymous No.10717146]

>>10717123
I'm saying those shitty works are indebted to Duchamp. What are you saying, that good contemporary modern works are indebted to Duchamp? Such as?

[Anonymous No.10717163]

>>10716443
>We have to provide a theoretical and philosophical context for the feelings of the tens of millions of people out there who are disgusted and feel an aversion for Modernism.
at no point in either of these overlong, angry, off-putting rants does this guy ever actually do this. he begs the question constantly. he talks about how people only like modern art just because they are told to like it, and then... just tells people they shouldn't. there's no explanation of why his favourite artists are the best - in fact at one point he says it's simply obvious from looking at them, that you should look at art as if there was no context. he doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of genuinely actually enjoying a piece of modern art. his position is completely dogmatic and not remotely philosophical.

If this was bait, well done. I've wasted half my afternoon reading this crap just in case there was a valid criticism somewhere that was worth thinking about. there isn't.

[Anonymous No.10717193]

>>10717116
>stylish as fuck
pic related

[Anonymous No.10717206]

>>10717193
What a God

[Anonymous No.10717340]

>>10717116
One of my old girlfriends kept a photography book of his on her coffee table. I never saw the appeal. I give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to me being to plebeian to understand it.

[Anonymous No.10717710]

>>10716990
>Nude Descending Staircase
I have no idea how you can have any feeling whatsoever for shit like this. A fleeting "oh, that's odd" sensation or "huh, well that's a nice pattern" but nothing more. And that's the function of painting, to produce feeling via visual effect.

[Anonymous No.10717736]

>>10712623
pic related

[Anonymous No.10717796]

>>10717710
Meant for >>10716962

[Anonymous No.10717853]

>>10717710
Maybe you feel that way but it's ambitious in trying to portray motion, freezing separate instances of being in one chain so you can see the entire descending of the staircase. It makes you think of Parmenides viewing the universe as averse to change and motion, seeing all instances within the universe as a static whole. Or it makes you think of the slow exposure on a camera.

I don't agree anyway that art has to cause feelings in all recipients, some people will always be averse or indifferent to something or art generally.

[Anonymous No.10717899]

>>10717853
>it's ambitious in trying to portray motion, freezing separate instances of being in one chain so you can see the entire descending of the staircase
There is no staircase to be seen.

>It makes you think of Parmenides viewing the universe as averse to change and motion, seeing all instances within the universe as a static whole.
Not really.

>Or it makes you think of the slow exposure on a camera.
Maybe this. Doesn't mean there is anything visually satisfying about it.

>I don't agree anyway that art has to cause feelings in all recipients
Feeling is a prerequisite to calling something a work of art. If one does not feel from the work, they have no right to call it a work of art. That said, different art forms have different functions. Painting's is visual.

[Anonymous No.10717920]

>>10717899
>If one does not feel from the work, they have no right to call it a work of art
pure ideology

[Anonymous No.10717932]

>>10717920
Pure common sense. Read Schiller sometime if you can't wrap your head around it.

[Anonymous No.10717937]

>>10717932
What should I read from him, exactly?

[Anonymous No.10717944]

>>10717932
Common sense is ideology, anon.

[Anonymous No.10717951]

>>10717937
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/schiller-education.asp

[Anonymous No.10718028]

>>10717899
>Feeling is a prerequisite to calling something a work of art.
that's the kind of stuff Duchamp was laughing at desu

[Anonymous No.10718051]

>>10718028
Sounds like a classic degenerate.

[Anonymous No.10718077]

>>10718028
yeah but he unironically presented a urinal as a work of art so the jokes on him ultimately, no matter what point is being made

[Anonymous No.10718100]

>>10718077
What's the joke?

[Anonymous No.10718108]

>>10718051
How so?

[Anonymous No.10718153]

>>10717899
You see the entirety of the figures descent.

Anyway there's no point arguing over whether the nude gives you feelings or not. You're a pleb and consider for one moment how ridiculous and narrow your definition of art is. Some art is functional for instance. Also who is it that decides the feeling that is provoked, does the Nude become art because I feel something looking at it, even though you do not? What feelings would a post-Christian world have towards the ceiling of the Sistine chapel?

Obviously the best works of art combine artistic technique, skill, beauty, feeling, intellect, but it is not a requirement that art be any of these things. Think.

[Anonymous No.10718156]

>>10718108
>introduce foreign concepts to a certain realm of human endeavor (they are foreign precisely because they are erroneous and the masters surrounding said realm know better)
>act like you know better
>even mock the people who are drastically more educated than you are

It's classic degeneracy.

[Anonymous No.10718162]

>>10716233
>Juan Felipe Herrera
googled the name + poemas and didnt get anything, not a single poem in two pages, just propaganda pieces of how good he is or what awards he received. whats going on here?

[Anonymous No.10718182]

>>10718153
>You see the entirety of the figures descent.
There are no figures to be seen.

>consider for one moment how ridiculous and narrow your definition of art is
It is "narrow" to you because you don't actually care about art and only seek to "expand" it into a realm that you do care about. You would rather it mold itself to your interests rather than the other way around. Which is fine, perfectly natural thing to do; you are in fact the pleb, however, since in the process you mutate it into something it isn't.

>Also who is it that decides the feeling that is provoked
The individuals best experienced with and educated in an art form.

>Think.
No, feel. That's the whole point. If you want to think, go read philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10718186]

>>10718156
Where did you get this definition of degeneracy, anon?

[Anonymous No.10718217]

>>10718186
It's fostered by my own experience and volition.

[Anonymous No.10718219]

>>10712623
>who is the Duchamp of literature?
James Joyce.

[Anonymous No.10718228]

>>10718217
It figures.

[Anonymous No.10718249]

Kind of weird he made that while French soldiers were dying en masse.

[Anonymous No.10718261]

>>10718228
I suspect you misunderstand. I'm well read, but at the same time I'm not simply regurgitating what I've read. I only say what I've felt to be the case myself. In that sense it is "by my own experience and volition." But I give credit where due when it is proper to give it.

[Anonymous No.10718440]

>>10716965
This is the correct answer, and this thread is full of painfully embarrassing contrived bullshit, but then again what do I expect from /lit/

[Anonymous No.10718566]

>>10718077
Duchamp certainly wasn't being unironic. Fountain itself is the joke, and it's gone over your head.

[Anonymous No.10718577]

>>10718156
>introduce foreign concepts to a certain realm of human endeavor
>classic degeneracy

and how exactly is human endeavour meant to progress in your universally familiar little world?

[Anonymous No.10718602]

>>10718577
By continually rebuilding the superior man who refines the insight of the previous age's superior men.

[Anonymous No.10718629]

>>10718602
how does the first superior man come to be? what's the lineage of these superior men in the history of art? are there any left, and if not who was the last one?

[Anonymous No.10718690]

>>10718629
>how does the first superior man come to be?
It's always a natural occurrence, like a storm cloud. It starts when comparison of things becomes possible.

>what's the lineage of these superior men in the history of art?
Read Schiller, as mentioned before. Read his educators if you're interested further. Do your own reading to see who he influenced. A philosopher that brought his aesthetic into the realm of philosophy is Nietzsche. You'll discover who are the superior men of today if you study these men.

[Anonymous No.10718701]

>>10718690
But comparison of things becomes possible when new concepts are introduced, anon.

[Anonymous No.10718702]

>>10717340
Dude, just get some sort of anthology on art history. While Duchamp had some very obscure works that would need a biography of his to start getting understood, the main gist of his early (and most important) works is pretty simple once you're acquainted with what was going on in art and aesthetics back then.

[Anonymous No.10718706]

>>10718701
Right, but not all of them survive the torrential storm that follows from superior men. Part of the building process is in the destruction of faulty thinking.

[Anonymous No.10718707]

Gertrude Stein

>The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

>There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

[Anonymous No.10718724]

>>10712781
this guy knows his duchamp and his stirner

[Anonymous No.10718735]

>>10718690
>what's the lineage of these superior men in the history of art?
>Read Schiller

alright, thanks for the recommendation. but could you sketch it out? just name a few names, chronologically, so I know what increasingly superior art looks like, otherwise we have nothing to compare Duchamp to. is this improvement in art, roughly speaking, about increasing realism? increasing technique? increasing aesthetics? increasing symbolism?

[Anonymous No.10718742]

>>10718706
>Part of the building process is in the destruction of faulty thinking.

which is precisely what Duchamp sets out to do, so...

[Anonymous No.10718748]

>>10717116
190m? i thought he was a manlet. look at that interview with him and that other big guy

[Anonymous No.10718752]

>>10718706
faulty thinking destroys itself desu, like heavy-handed metaphors

[Anonymous No.10718755]

>>10717736
what is this?

[Anonymous No.10718784]

>>10718755
A work of literature.

[Anonymous No.10718785]

gertrude stein

[Anonymous No.10718787]

>>10718735
>just name a few names, chronologically, so I know what increasingly superior art looks like
I'll say this: painting is no longer of superior art. They were overtaken by photography, then movies. It's about the aesthetic experience.

[Anonymous No.10718803]

>>10718742
Duchamp is a faulty thinker.

[Anonymous No.10718814]

>>10718803
How so?

[Anonymous No.10718836]

>>10718784
a poetry book rrose selavy by marcel duchamp?

[Anonymous No.10718842]

>>10718787
fucking lol. photography is pygmy tier compared to the tradition of painting

[Anonymous No.10718844]

>>10718707
>>10718785

she's more of a Picasso.

[Anonymous No.10718850]

>>10718182
So for you art has to appeal to authority and be designated by an intellectual class. Someone such as Duchamp was incredibly knowledgeable in art history and as you can see from works such as Etant Donne he was more than capable of painting well and with feeling. But yet what he terms art you disagree with so...

Also by your 'feeling' measure modern pieces of shit like Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons are Art to you because one has immediate feelings of 'death' and the other makes you 'feel like a kid again' and because they pay nameless experts of their craft to build them large tanks or concrete/cast iron sculptures. Are you an artist because you make me 'feel' embarrassed to be alive?

I do not understand what you mean about expanding art beyond my caring. I extended nothing I'm simply talking of how wide and varied art is rather than erecting a pathetic elitist and vague fence around art. You would deny the functional art of cave drawing.

No. I am not telling you to think when viewing art, think about art and tell me how a landscape has any more feeling to it than a urinal.

[Anonymous No.10718856]

>>10717899
>he doesn't have an aesthetic appreciation for pure forms disposed in the space
I bet you don't even like Picasso you turbopleb.

[Anonymous No.10718865]

>>10718814
>Sometimes the assault is direct: Marcel Duchamp places a moustache on the upper lip of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, thus signalling his contempt for the whole enterprise of art as traditionally understood. Duchamp endeavored to explode the whole category of aesthetic achievement. He hoped that Dada would spell the end of art as traditionally understood. It didn't happen. But how many little Duchamps have you glimpsed scurrying around the contemporary art world? Duchamp took an ordinary snow shovel and exhibited it as a work of art. How daring! But that was 1915. He pulled the same trick with a urinal. How transgressive! But that was 1917. Duchamp started a cottage industry that is still going strong. But he and his Dadaist heirs, though impish, are at least direct. More often the attack on art proceeds by a strategy of indirection. The work of art is seized as an occasion for critical lucubration, for political sermonizing, for theoretical or pseudo-theoretical exegesis. (It is worth noting that Duchamp, whatever his intentions, has also inspired plenty of exegesis.) Here, too, there is an element of spurious aggrandizement—of the interpreter. But for the work of art, the result is a despoliation, a rape.

By Roger Kimball. Duchamp is a faulty thinker in that he involved himself with art, which is the domain of the aesthetic, and did nothing to enhance or preserve it and only, directly and indirectly, hampered it. Regardless of his intentions — even if they were to expose the fact that some museum curators had lost sight of the aesthetic in art — the final result is this: he did not work towards enhancing the aesthetic experience, he only spent his time mocking, "exposing," and confusing the subject even further. And that makes him a faulty thinker.

[Anonymous No.10718889]

>>10718865
>He actually believes in progression

[Anonymous No.10718897]

>>10712781
stirner isn't influential though

[Anonymous No.10718953]

>>10718865
>He hoped that Dada would spell the end of art as traditionally understood. It didn't happen. But how many little Duchamps have you glimpsed scurrying around the contemporary art world?

in other words, it absolutely did happen. Kimball is fighting a battle that's already lost.

you're begging the question by simply stating that Duchamp is a faulty thinker just because he doesn't associate art and the aesthetic experience, as it is that's just a dogmatic statement about the definition of art.

[Anonymous No.10718970]

>>10718953
It didn't, because the aesthetic experience is still understood and sought after. Photography and then movies and then video games would not have developed otherwise, nor would there still be illustrators and other visual artists who continue to work towards the traditionally understood aesthetic experience.

>as it is that's just a dogmatic statement about the definition of art
Because you haven't done the studying to know as the masters knew.

[Anonymous No.10718985]

>>10718970
t.

[Anonymous No.10719024]

>>10718985

[Anonymous No.10719037]

>>10719024

[Anonymous No.10719065]

>>10719037
i'd say looking like retards is ok for those kids since they look about 12 but then there's that one guy with the oldman goatee that has to be about 35 in their crew, wtf

[Anonymous No.10719104]

>>10719065
It's a /pol/ meetup haha

[Anonymous No.10719124]

>>10718970
>It didn't, because the aesthetic experience is still understood and sought after.

Sure, I seek aesthetic experience myself in art, and I very much enjoy a lot of art because of its aesthetic qualities, but I don't define art by it, nor by anything else, because you simply can't define art.

You don't like the same kind of art as Duchamp. Me neither, since I do appreciate visual effect, very much so. But it's all still art. Pretending that you like art and what Duchamp likes is something else is, quite frankly, really insecure. He's not a faulty thinker, he's entirely consistent. You just have different taste.

[Anonymous No.10719146]

>>10719124
>you simply can't define art.
Unfortunately for Duchamp and folks that like him, you certainly can. And great minds have. The definition is like a scientific theory — not without room for further refinement, and yet, not equal to all other theories. Some theories are more accurate than others. Duchamp's is extremely inaccurate. Don't believe me? Start reading some guys I've mentioned itt.

[Anonymous No.10719163]

>>10719146
Please define it then

[Anonymous No.10719168]

>>10719104
and no one is surprised

[Anonymous No.10719172]

>>10719163
It'd be rather pointless if you didn't have the perspective to understand it. You need to do the reading, no way around it. The only other option is to stop pretending you know things about a subject you have not properly studied.

[Anonymous No.10719194]

>>10719146
>The definition is like a scientific theory
so what predictions, observations or experiments do you make to check that your theory of the definition of art is correct?

[Anonymous No.10719208]

>>10719194
Those pertaining to the aesthetic experience in various forms of art.

[Anonymous No.10719218]

>>10719208
pertaining how exactly? what evidence, or observation, would convince you to change your definition of art?

[Anonymous No.10719363]

>>10719218
It's an emotional experience, man. You can feel it.

[Anonymous No.10719394]

>>10718162

He's american. American Poet Laureate 2015-2017. His stuff is in english. and trash

[Anonymous No.10719423]

>>10718566
it's a joke all right. not _the_ joke but _a_ joke.

[Anonymous No.10719473]

>>10719363
a definition please.

[Anonymous No.10719560]

>>10719473
feels>reals

[Anonymous No.10719561]

>>10719363
And I feel things when I look at certain Duchamp pieces

[Anonymous No.10719748]

>>10719560
just as I suspected.

[Anonymous No.10719776]

>>10719473
Art is the endeavor of human creation to produce aesthetic effect. Works of art are human creations which produce the highest aesthetic effects. Aesthetic effects are produced by significant forms, i.e., those arrangements of elements which a particular artform has to work with which make us feel via the sense(s) which said artform communicates through. An aesthetic effect is an effect that creates an aesthetic emotion, which is not just the sensation of beholding beauty, but also the sensation of reverence and freedom, as one might feel when one is dancing elegantly and freely with a lover, which in total produces a sort of "timelessness" in the one who experiences it.

There is your definition. It may not be perfect, but that's because I am still learning how to articulate it fully. One thing is clear though, I've felt it deeply, so while I may not know how to articulate it perfectly yet, I know what is wrong among the criticism of others.

>>10719561
One could feel aesthetic emotion when looking at a Duchamp piece. I haven't seen anyone in this thread or elsewhere really who talk about aesthetics when talking about Duchamp though. They care more about the social prestige and controversy that it generates, the thought it produces, the politics of it, they are consumed by thought and not by feeling. "I feel a sense of the aesthetic when I see creations which exemplify bold political statement," one could say though, and I wouldn't disagree with it. BUT — then you have to reconcile that with the artform in question. Does that aesthetic effect really have to do with the visual arts, then, or something else? Because then it becomes clearer that you don't particularly care for the visual arts... you only care about them as far as they produce bold political statements. But those could be expressed in another artform, so whatever you observe about your own aesthetic experience can't be said to be directly relevant to the visual arts. Yet there are art historians who like Duchamp and will say that all of that is, in fact, directly relevant, and then they make very silly statements like "all art is political; all painting was made merely for political statement." Once this statement is made, it's clear that the person making the statement does NOT care about the aesthetic experience, what they felt from the piece, but only the political statement that it made, because it's that metric they are using to judge all art, which is the far less accurate metric.

[Anonymous No.10720696]

>>10719776
thanks, this is much, much better than calling Duchamp a degenerate.

>Art is the endeavor of human creation to produce aesthetic effect.
or in Duchamp's case, during a certain period at least, it's the endeavor to produce no aesthetic effect at all. bear in mind that that's not the same thing as simply not endeavouring to create aesthetic effect. with something like Fountain, or In Advance Of The Broken Arm, Duchamp is presenting something that, in the gallery context, takes the place of art. the lack of aesthetic effect then becomes, in itself, an effect.

the concept of art as significant form - with which I largely agree - already discards representation, symbolism, technique, etc. Duchamp just takes it a step further, maybe a step over where there should be an edge... but there's no way to show where the edge is, and Duchamp really doesn't care in any case.

>They care more about the social prestige and controversy that it generates, the thought it produces, the politics of it, they are consumed by thought and not by feeling.

I suppose that might be true of some people. Personally I don't gain any social prestige from appreciating Duchamp, nor am I politicising anything. (You're the first person to bring up politics in this thread...) I absolutely do care about the visual arts, and Duchamp, by ignoring aesthetics completely, contextualises all of it, from my point of view at least.

let's be clear, Fountain isn't a great artistic object and it isn't meant to be, not even close. it's great, though, as art criticism put into practise. it's similar to Cage. four and a half minutes of silence has no intrinsic aesthetic value, but sitting for four and a half minutes in a concert hall watching a musician on silence does tell you something about the process of listening to music.

and if you really want to approach the definition of art like a scientific theory, then you should at the very least stop being so hostile about Duchamp making experiments.

[Anonymous No.10720880]

>>10720696
>the lack of aesthetic effect then becomes, in itself, an effect.
Very nice.

However, as cleverly put as that is, am I really to believe that the "lack of aesthetic effect" is creating an aesthetic effect? To what person would the "lack of aesthetic effect" create an aesthetic effect? What is even creating the aesthetic effect, then? Something else other than the elements contained within an artform, which constitute and define the artform, it seems — their own thoughts on an unrelated subject, the controversy surrounding the piece, the political discourse that the piece results in, etc. Not, in fact, anything of the eye, since none of the visual elements are creating an aesthetic effect, as by your admission of the "lack of aesthetic effect" — and the aesthetic effect as created by the eye is what the visual arts are DEFINED BY — which means whoever is getting an aesthetic effect from the "lack of aesthetic effect" is not receiving an aesthetic effect from the visual arts, which means they are not EXPERIENCING the visual arts, which means they are not INVOLVED in the visual arts, AT ALL. And the same goes for any art form. Silence is not music. In short, Duchamp is not a visual artist — he is deeply confused, or perhaps a force of malevolence (as the L.H.O.O.Q. suggests), just like all the modernists are, who claim to be "breaking new ground" when they are in fact just reversing the definitions of long-since established concepts and projects to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they were. That is not innovation, by definition, but the opposite, a total wipe of a tradition, which means the result has in fact nothing to do with the visual arts, or any art form, and at the end of the day, nothing to do with art in general, since the claimed "aesthetic effect" being experienced is not stemming at all from human creation, but from its opposite: human destruction.

>Personally I don't gain any social prestige from appreciating Duchamp
What else is there to appreciate? The contours of non-existence objects in his pieces? As we already discussed earlier, in his Nude Descending Staircase, there is no staircase to be seen, no nude figure to be seen. You appreciate the mush of colors then? I suppose that's fine.

>and if you really want to approach the definition of art like a scientific theory, then you should at the very least stop being so hostile about Duchamp making experiments.
His "experiments" are on par with someone going around planting C4s in science labs and annihilating them. But he's "doing science!" because he's using a C4 explosive. The idea that he is doing "experiments" is a joke — the only utility it has at all is as some asinine bullshit to laugh at. But it's not as funny as it is incredibly annoying.

[Anonymous No.10720956]

>>10720696
>>10720880
Also, you would realize why people actually fall for this shit, and why so many seem to have such a poor understanding of artforms, if you had read the material that was sourced, like Schiller's piece. In that he talks at great length about what changes from government did to change the aesthetic experience. Basically, people have become increasingly fragmented, because society has become increasingly fragmented with more and more specializations and separations / divisions, and people analyze everything from their highly specialized crevices in society, and thus skew what they analyze to fit their little worlds.

[Anonymous No.10721194]

>>10720880
>the only utility it has at all is as some asinine bullshit to laugh at
But the reactions to the pieces are still pretty aesthetic imo. One would think their shock value would have faded fast but it hasn't a hundred years later, Duchamp must have done something right. The lunatics that try to smash or piss in the urinal are hilarious. If that's not Dada I don't know what is.

[Anonymous No.10721430]

>>10720880
>am I really to believe that the "lack of aesthetic effect" is creating an aesthetic effect
no, you misunderstand. the effect created isn't an aesthetic one. it relates to the experience of viewing - ordinarily one would view an artistic object in order to determine the aesthetic effect produced by that object. Duchamp makes you view the object but removes the aesthetic effect, leaving you looking at just an object. which of course is utterly pointless and defeats the object of art entirely.

the effect of this kind of viewing on you, apparently, is simply irritation, and to an unhealthy degree, at that. I've seen Fountain in real life (or rather one of the sixteen reproductions) and to me it's hilarious, and actually kind of refreshing. I spend so much time in a gallery trying to evaluate the artistic merit of each piece, then Fountain is this object with no artistic merit whatsoever - it's like Duchamp reminding you that all art is, when you get down to it, is looking at objects.

It's an experiment in the following sense: one way to define visual art is "objects that we look at, expecting a visual effect" and in order to investigate that definition Duchamp takes objects with no visual effect, then makes us look at them while expecting a visual effect. you think it's obnoxious, I think it's funny. so it goes.

>like all the modernists are, who claim to be "breaking new ground" when they are in fact just reversing the definitions of long-since established concepts and projects to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they were.

by your own criterion of significant form, I'd expect you to consider a lot of modern art to be not only valid but actually a purer art form than anything that came before, having dispensed with content entirely. Kandinsky has no content but has significant form, same with Rothko, same with Mondrian, and so on.

>That is not innovation, by definition, but the opposite, a total wipe of a tradition, which means the result has in fact nothing to do with the visual arts, or any art form, and at the end of the day, nothing to do with art in general, since the claimed "aesthetic effect" being experienced is not stemming at all from human creation, but from its opposite: human destruction.

you're being extremely inconsistent here, because you've claimed that your enjoyment of art is based purely on its form, but you are now claiming that it must follow tradition, or not be visual art at all. tradition is not form. if, while viewing a work of art, you are considering its relation with tradition, you are, by definition, distracted from the form. in fact this claim of yours, that art must rely on tradition and never reconsider its principles or else it is "human destruction" sounds awfully political to me. if significant form is actually the basis of aesthetics, then all that matters is the response of the particular viewer to the particular form, tradition has nothing to do with that at all.

[Anonymous No.10721790]

>>10721430
1/2

>Duchamp makes you view the object but removes the aesthetic effect, leaving you looking at just an object. which of course is utterly pointless and defeats the object of art entirely.
So he indeed does have nothing to do with art. Well alright then.

>the effect of this kind of viewing on you, apparently, is simply irritation, and to an unhealthy degree, at that.
Having passion is unhealthy now?

>I spend so much time in a gallery trying to evaluate the artistic merit of each piece, then Fountain is this object with no artistic merit whatsoever - it's like Duchamp reminding you that all art is, when you get down to it, is looking at objects.
You might look at it this way, which isn't so bad I guess, but if you examine more closely what some art critics have said with complete sincerity about art since Duchamp, there's much less to laugh about then. For you it's relief and makes you laugh. For others, though, it enables their anarchist desires (which I suspect your laughter has a subtle trace of in it too). The modernists are nihilists, basically; their work suggests that life is frivolous and that giving serious effort respect is a silly thing to do (both of which are just true for the spirit in decline). I'd rather draw the line short and preserve my passion than to concede to any of this.

>Kandinsky has no content but has significant form, same with Rothko, same with Mondrian, and so on.
Their form is extremely weak to me; they have insignificant form, borderline formlessness. I don't share your education. I'm not amused by mental jargon. When I want to see a beautiful painting, I'll go see works by John William Waterhouse, Edmund Blair Leighton, Frank Dicksee, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bougeureau, many many more. The "realists". The people who clearly care about the artform they work in. Not Kandinsky, Rothko, Mondrian, Duchamp, etc. They care more about themselves.

>you're being extremely inconsistent here, because you've claimed that your enjoyment of art is based purely on its form, but you are now claiming that it must follow tradition, or not be visual art at all.
Explain to me how something is part of the visual arts if it has nothing to do with the visual arts? What Duchamp did had nothing to do with the visual arts. He's not "making us view" anything other than his own dick, particularly because there IS NOTHING TO VIEW in his crap. There might as well be negative space put on display and called visual art — yes, it making no sense is exactly my point. His crap only makes sense if you consider it from the perspective that he was interested in making a mockery of the arts.

[Anonymous No.10721793]

>>10721790
2/2

>tradition is not form.
Tradition is what allows us to continuously improve significant form to a higher complexity; what lets us find significance in more complex forms. After one has had the aesthetic experience from a significant form, and then reflected on it outside the experience, until it is understood, one then overcomes it, and from that point the mind relaxes, seeking the aesthetic experience again, but is now unable to re-obtain it as easily from the same form, and so we start our work towards creating a form more complex than the previous, that will once again generate the aesthetic experience. From Schiller:

>It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character; to a certain extent it is from the character that this light proceeds; for the road that terminates in the head must pass through the heart. Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render efficacious in practice the improvements of ideas, but to call this improvement into existence.

By the way, what Duchamp did was not merely a reconsideration of the principles of the visual arts. It was a wipe of them. This is not the same thing. For innovation to occur, you must acknowledge what was previously laid down. Duchamp only made acknowledgement as something to oppose, and then he wiped them; i.e. his "principles" ceased to acknowledge. The Impressionists were closer to being the people who "reconsidered the principles" of the visual arts, by blurring lines and colors and employing incomplete forms which achieved a different kind of visual effect from it. Unlike Duchamp, they actually achieved a kind of visual effect, an aesthetic experience related to the visual. In their work you can still see things, they are just muddier. Inferior to the "realists" but at least still part of the visual arts in the sense that the effects they achieve, if they do achieve any, are still related to the visual.

[Anonymous No.10721808]

>>10717340
>One of my old girlfriends kept a photography book of his on her coffee table
CHAMPE'D

[Anonymous No.10722091]

pic related achieves a visual effect

[Anonymous No.10722279]

>>10719363
everything is an emotional experience, moron

[Anonymous No.10722379]

>>10718897
Where can i find one of these rare Jezebels at?

[Anonymous No.10722523]

>>10716247
seconded

[Anonymous No.10722577]

[Anonymous No.10722779]

>>10721790
>When I want to see a beautiful painting, I'll go see works by John William Waterhouse, Edmund Blair Leighton, Frank Dicksee, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bougeureau
You named l'art pompier academicist trash, not realists.
>I don't share your education.
You don't share any education if you think kitchmeister extraordinaire like Bougereau is worth the canvass he is painted on.

[Anonymous No.10723087]

>>10722779
>You named l'art pompier academicist trash, not realists.
The term "realist" is meaningless. It does not refer to a time period or even a style. You aren't, once again, actually using your eyes on the work, and are judging by some external non-artistic metric. There are illustrators in the 21st century I would even regard as part of the visual arts because I have eyes and I know how to use them.

[Anonymous No.10723128]

>>10721790
>defeats the object of art entirely.
>So he indeed does have nothing to do with art.
no, defeating the object of art has EVERYTHING to do with art.

>if you examine more closely what some art critics have said with complete sincerity about art since Duchamp, there's much less to laugh about then.
I don't honestly care about what art critics have said since Duchamp, I care about what Duchamp himself said and did. Duchamp made a discovery about the nature of art, the boundaries of art, by making pieces that may or may not be art depending how you define art. that's an observation, an experiment, relating to art. it's not Duchamp's fault that art can't be defined, that's just something that he had observed and pointed out.

>Their form is extremely weak to me; they have insignificant form, borderline formlessness. I don't share your education. I'm not amused by mental jargon.
you aren't talking about whether or not it's art here, you're talking about whether or not you like it. you've decided the form is insignificant because it doesn't do anything for you personally.

borderline formlessness is still form, for one thing, a set of colours and shapes that produce a visual effect.

and I'm not sure why you assume that my personal enjoyment of art is to do with mental jargon, either, because in fact it is simply to do with art itself and the whole range of things it can do. I can assure you that I have genuinely loved paintings that you would downright loathe, for nothing other than their arrangement of colour and form. and I mean loved them while standing in front of them in a gallery, by the way, not just loved the concept.

our tastes are different. that doesn't mean that what you like is art and what I like is something else. we both like art, but we like different things in our art. I bet we can find a things in common though: pic related?

>Explain to me how something is part of the visual arts if it has nothing to do with the visual arts?
he has to do with the visual arts because he is experimenting with the experience of viewing, which is central to the visual arts.

>His crap only makes sense if you consider it from the perspective that he was interested in making a mockery of the arts.
he's making a mockery of the attempt to define art, because there is no definition of art, as you yourself are showing by arguing yourself round in circles, first claiming that art is purely aesthetic, and then that it depends on tradition, defining art as significant form and then significant form as... your personal taste.

>The "realists". The people who clearly care about the artform they work in.
to take just an obvious example, it's pretty clear that Rothko cares deeply about painting, precisely because he produces visual effect using only paint, paint that looks like paint, not pretending to be anything else.

[Anonymous No.10723150]

>>10723128
>destroying art has EVERYTHING to do with art.
k

>Duchamp made a discovery about the nature of art, the boundaries of art, by making pieces that may or may not be art depending how you define art.
Depending on whether you define art as it is defined or if you use your own private definition that has nothing to do with the enterprise of art, you mean. i.e. no discovery of the sort was made.

>it's not Duchamp's fault that art can't be defined
It's not Duchamp's fault that he didn't read his predecessors enough and was too stupid to understand what it was about.

>that doesn't mean that what you like is art and what I like is something else.
It indeed does depending on why you like it. If you enjoy a Rothko for its use of color then that's fine, because that is within the realm of visual art, that pleasure is in the visual. If you like it because of its "deconstructive" elements or because of some abstract principle apparently embedded in the work although it is not visibly there in the slightest, then no, what you like does not have to do with the eye, which means it does not have to do with the visual arts. What art form does it have to do with then? If none of them, then it has nothing to do with art at all.

>first claiming that art is purely aesthetic, and then that it depends on tradition, defining art as significant form and then significant form as... your personal taste.
You are barely following me, according to this discussion.

[Anonymous No.10723186]

>>10719172
I'm a literal bachelor in visual arts. Please define it.

[Anonymous No.10723193]

>>10723186
See >>10719776

[Anonymous No.10723196]

>>10721790
>Borgereau
oh it's you
>>10722779
Leave it at that, this dude has been spamming walls of text on /lit/ for 2 years because he can't accept people are immune to the retinal jew.

[Anonymous No.10723225]

>>10723196
>the retinal jew
The what now?

[Anonymous No.10723248]

>>10721793
>Tradition is what allows us to continuously improve significant form to a higher complexity; what lets us find significance in more complex forms.
why should significant form always become more complex? simple forms have an aesthetic effect too, and there's no reason I can see that those effects can't be significant.

how do you feel about, say, Monet? was he increasing or decreasing the complexity of form? was he improving art? was he visual art at all? I really shouldn't have to explicitly ask you whether or not you consider Monet to be visual art, but here we are... perhaps, for you, the waterlilies are "human destruction" since they move away from representation and towards abstraction.


>After one has had the aesthetic experience from a significant form
since you use this bit of jargon so much, could you tell me what significant form actually involves? not the concept but some concrete examples. let's say you pick just two paintings maybe fifty, a hundred years apart. you tell me what the significant form is in one, then how the significant form in the next is more complex.

>In their work you can still see things, they are just muddier. Inferior to the "realists"
ah, there's your opinion of Monet. so now it seems that for you superiority in the visual arts is about "seeing things" which is interesting, because in that case, for something to be better visual art it must represent something else. but representation is not in itself an aesthetic effect. it's not form, it's content.


>but at least still part of the visual arts in the sense that the effects they achieve, if they do achieve any, are still related to the visual
even the effects of Fountain are related to the visual, but the relation is not the usual one.

presumably however, if all effects achieved by art are achieved by the visual, you must despise any kind of symbolism in realist art. it must also make you furious when artists paint scenes from history or mythology, since that creates an effect which is related to non-visual considerations.

[Anonymous No.10723265]

>>10719776
It's very dull talking to you, you always pontificate and poeticize everything in an attempt to hide your vanity. The problem with your thought is that it's simply completely outdated, you feel you have the authority to disregard everything artists and aestheticists did during the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, let's take your post point by point (ignoring, of course, your retarded purple prose):
>Art is the endeavor of human creation to produce aesthetic effect. Works of art are human creations which produce the highest aesthetic effects.
Now, this definition is fantastic, because you can't possibly accept Duchamp as an artist, yet, mass produced old lady porcelainware happens to be.
Your attempt to stick art to purely aesthetic standards is so flimsy that you barely take a sentence to claim it needs to communicate something. You don't KNOW it, but there is a whole iconographic and conceptual level on classical paintings which completely evades you, because you haven't been educated in WHERE or WHAT to look for. You just see a composition of forms and colors which has been so ingrained into western compositional thought that it automatically feels natural to you, and you assume that's the way things are, but what you're actually doing is completely disregarding these artists' intentions and goals, and art's goal, as a whole. Your deffinition of art completely misses the fact that the very notion of an aesthetic experience or a disinterested pleasure preclude a harmonical existence between society and art (or the artist), and while this has happened in the past, it's not a constant.
Art works either as a valve or a mirror to society's traumas and questions, this is the one constant that predates even western art, one could almost claim art is just a form of applied philosophy. You, not having the face of former societies, don't know what to look for in their mirrors, so you end up seeing nothing but a very pretty glass. Nothing you say or do will change that.

[Anonymous No.10723276]

>>10723150
>Depending on whether you define art as it is defined or if you use your own private definition
I don't define art at all.

>that doesn't mean that what you like is art and what I like is something else.
>It indeed does depending on why you like it.
well that's settled then. by your own admission, whether or not something is art depends on how you look at it, so even your own definition of art has more to do with the experience of viewing than the actual art itself.

[Anonymous No.10723306]

>>10723265
>You, not having the face of former societies, don't know what to look for in their mirrors, so you end up seeing nothing but a very pretty glass.
I like how you put that anon, it's a good point and well made.

[Anonymous No.10723339]

>>10723248
>why should significant form always become more complex? simple forms have an aesthetic effect too, and there's no reason I can see that those effects can't be significant.
Human psychology deems it necessary. Boredom seeps in when we have already indulged in simpler things. That is why everything we create or work with becomes increasingly more complex over time.

Now, as far as the visual arts are defined (the art related to the sense of the eye), increasing complexity means increasing visual detail. The aesthetic experience in visual art comes from seeing those details. So Monet is a lesser visual experience. That doesn't mean Monet isn't still a pleasant one.

>could you tell me what significant form actually involves? not the concept but some concrete examples.
It's relative. Only the conceptual can be told about it. It also differs per artform, but for the visual arts, like Bell says,

>What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible — significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form”; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

Read it here >>10716779

>so now it seems that for you superiority in the visual arts is about "seeing things" which is interesting
I don't know if it's interesting. It seems kind of obvious to me!

>for something to be better visual art it must represent something else. but representation is not in itself an aesthetic effect. it's not form, it's content.
>it must also make you furious when artists paint scenes from history or mythology, since that creates an effect which is related to non-visual considerations.
It doesn't, but I think you're touching on the deeper problem here, or the problem that got this whole shebang started. In the next post I'll answer.

[Anonymous No.10723348]

>>10723265
I don't really have nothing to add now that I think of it. I don't even think I had anything to add when I began posting, not only did the other guy did a pretty good job of trying to educate you, me and others have made all of these points in threads before and you just ignore every possible evidence.

Also, before you mention it, yes, conceptual tension doesn't exclude a work of having aesthetic value, but modernist art denies the aesthetic experience for different and varied, but all equally justified, reasons. You just ignore them because they don't fit within your narrow view of art.

Keep looking at rosy ladies in frilly socks until death comes and takes you, honestly.

[Anonymous No.10723349]

>>10716984
"art is a portrait of it's time"

[Anonymous No.10723356]

>>10716443
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
How can this board be populated with such plebs??

[Anonymous No.10723357]

>>10718748
That interview was in his old age, people get smaller. I actually checked, he was 1,70 something. So he was probably tall in france but kind of a manlet in the US. Now this got me thinking how much of a manlent Man Ray must have been, since Duchamp always looks like half a head taller than him in their pictures together, probably where I got the impression he was so tall.

[Anonymous No.10723365]

>>10716984
While he is definitely shit, me and a friend once theorized he is SO shit that future historians will end up reading him as a guy who sold himself as art. Whenever some retarded art type cliche comes up in a movie or series, they always sound like Jeff Koons. The man is like Bane with "Spectacle" instead of "Darkness", he should probably be hailed as the consumation of american culture.

[Anonymous No.10723415]

>>10723248
>>10723339
First, from Schiller... at the beginning of his Letters, he attributes the decline of aesthetic sensibility to the changes in social structure brought on by government. With greater division of professions and stricter specializations came minds that were more fragmented and less able to see the totality of things but rather things only from their highly specialized view. He writes:

>Man himself eternally chained down to a little fragment of the whole, only forms a kind of fragment; having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being; and instead of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being, he ends by being nothing more than the living impress of the craft to which he devotes himself, of the science that he cultivates. This very partial and paltry relation, linking the isolated members to the whole, does not depend on forms that are given spontaneously; for how could a complicated machine, which shuns the light, conaide itself to the free will of man? This relation is rather dictated, with a rigorous strictness, by a formulary in which the free intelligence of man is chained down. The dead letter takes the place of a living meaning, and a practised memory becomes a safer guide than genius and feeling.

The source of aesthetic emotion needs to be defined PER artform. Really, we have different artforms because we have multiple senses and each bring on aesthetic emotion in their own way. There's a source common to all of them though (significant form).

Aesthetic emotion is drawn on from Seeing in the visual arts, capitalization for emphasis. The process of Seeing does require objects, or representation of some kind, otherwise you aren't seeing anything. However, it's not in those objects or representation (the "content") per se that we draw aesthetic emotion from, but in the Seeing of them and the significant form in them.

The less educated mind (or rather, going back to Schiller's point, the more fragmented mind) finds this difficult to consider. Because you are not as educated on a mythological scene, it is easy to assume that the artist intended to express his knowledge of the scene rather than the feeling from Seeing. This is wrong though. The artist, having already known about the mythological scene, now wishes to feel it. When he paints the scene, he uses lines and colors to create a tone, or atmospheric effect, for the eye, so that he can feel the scene from Seeing. It has nothing to do with expressing knowledge of the scene. But the less educated mind, since it first encounters the painting and then has to struggle with learning about the scene, can fall into the erroneous assumption that the knowledge of the scene was the priority here, or is the most significant element here, to appreciating art. It's not though; it's feeling that artists and art is preoccupied with chiefly.

[Anonymous No.10723421]

>>10723339
>Boredom seeps in when we have already indulged in simpler things.
maybe for you. this once again is a statement of your own taste. I find that apparently simple forms can be very aesthetically affecting, cf Rothko. although of course, Rothko, in actual fact, is more detailed than he would appear: every brushstroke in a Rothko is a detail.

>In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.
my aesthetic emotions are certainly stirred by Rothko, or Monet, by the lines and colours combined, the forms and relations of forms, so I don't know why you think this is an argument against my position. thanks for linking me to my own post, by the way. I posted it in reply to your posting of those two ridiculous articles because they fetishise tradition, which is not form.

>so now it seems that for you superiority in the visual arts is about "seeing things" which is interesting
>I don't know if it's interesting. It seems kind of obvious to me!
it's interesting because you think you don't see anything when you look at abstract art. you do, of course, and what you see is the art itself, not what it represents. what you see is significant form. when you say that you can't see things as well in impressionism as you can see them in realism, what you are admitting to is an aesthetic appreciation based not on form but in content. that is, unless you claim that the only forms which have aesthetic value are forms which already exist in nature, in which case you may as well abandon painting completely because photography has superceded it.

in fact surely by your system where more detail is more aesthetic, and once you've seen a more aesthetic (so detailed) piece of art you are no longer satisfied with less aesthetic (so detailed) pieces of art, you ought to not be able to appreciate painting at all once you've seen a high definition photograph.

[Anonymous No.10723442]

>>10723306
Seconding this

[Anonymous No.10723452]

>>10723356
Cant blame him desu. I was like that when i was 18-19 before i went full schizo-degenerate.

[Anonymous No.10723453]

>>10723265
>Now, this definition is fantastic, because you can't possibly accept Duchamp as an artist, yet, mass produced old lady porcelainware happens to be.
At least you can sense how little Duchamp means to me.

>You don't KNOW it, but there is a whole iconographic and conceptual level on classical paintings which completely evades you, because you haven't been educated in WHERE or WHAT to look for. You just see a composition of forms and colors which has been so ingrained into western compositional thought that it automatically feels natural to you, and you assume that's the way things are, but what you're actually doing is completely disregarding these artists' intentions and goals, and art's goal, as a whole.
It's the other way around. See >>10723415 my point which is ultimately Schiller's which is that the idea that the objects and representation in the visual arts is the aesthetic experience of it or ever was and not from the sense of the eye and the emotion its effects create comes from the fragmented mind that society has formed. This idea may be "outdated" to most of the world, but not really — I don't believe this idea has ever been for the majority of people. It has always been and still is something which only the most wholesome individuals can experience (individuals who are always outliers of society in some way).

>You, not having the face of former societies, don't know what to look for in their mirrors, so you end up seeing nothing but a very pretty glass.
It is ENTIRELY the other way around. You, not having the face of former societies, don't know what to look for in their mirrors, so you end up seeing "meaning" and "ideas" and "mirrors of the ages" rather than the raw emotion of the experience, a desire which comes AFTER knowing those things.

[Anonymous No.10723460]

>>10723415
>Schiller
>A romantic talking about the decline of art
My sides

[Anonymous No.10723461]

>>10723365
Completely agree, although I stated all of the above I could binge watch him for hours as a fascinating spectacle due to the reasons you pointed out

[Anonymous No.10723489]

>>10723415
>he attributes the decline of aesthetic sensibility to the changes in social structure brought on by government.
oh I see, so he is politicising art. that's a pity, because I don't want to discuss politics, I want to discuss art.

>Aesthetic emotion is drawn on from Seeing in the visual arts, capitalization for emphasis. The process of Seeing does require objects, or representation of some kind, otherwise you aren't seeing anything. However, it's not in those objects or representation (the "content") per se that we draw aesthetic emotion from, but in the Seeing of them
I agree, and that's exactly why Duchamp is important. he is demonstrating the process of Seeing, by making an artwork that consists only of Seeing. his broader point being that if visual art is the act of Seeing, then the act of Seeing is visual art, and so literally anything you look at can be considered as art. if art is about Seeing, as you yourself say, then it doesn't in fact depend on what is Seen and especially not on the intention behind what is seen. which is why I find it strange that you keep talking about tradition, which cannot be Seen and has no significant form.

>The artist, having already known about the mythological scene, now wishes to feel it. When he paints the scene, he uses lines and colors to create a tone, or atmospheric effect, for the eye, so that he can feel the scene from Seeing. It has nothing to do with expressing knowledge of the scene. But the less educated mind, since it first encounters the painting and then has to struggle with learning about the scene, can fall into the erroneous assumption that the knowledge of the scene was the priority here, or is the most significant element here, to appreciating art. It's not though; it's feeling that artists and art is preoccupied with chiefly.
so, again, you have no reason to consider your realists inferior to abstract expressionism, which is preoccupied entirely with feeling and with using colours and lines to create a tone, or atmospheric effect, for the eye, so that one can feel an emotion from Seeing.

and you've once again introduced something into the appreciation of art which is not form, or Seeing: education about mythology.

in one of those awful artrenewal articles you posted, he goes off on a rant at some poor innocent person who said they liked Picasso once they knew what he was trying to do. that they could feel something once they were told about Picasso's intentions. that, apparently, was a travesty, because you shouldn't have to be taught anything to appreciate art, it's inherent to the art itself. but here you are now telling me that I'm misunderstanding a piece of art because I am "not as educated on a mythological scene"

do you see how entirely inconsistent this is? surely I can just tell you that you don't appreciate Picasso because you are not educated enough about cubism.

[Anonymous No.10723500]

>>10723421
>my aesthetic emotions are certainly stirred by Rothko, or Monet, by the lines and colours combined, the forms and relations of forms, so I don't know why you think this is an argument against my position.
I didn't say it was. In fact, I said here:

>>10723150
>If you enjoy a Rothko for its use of color then that's fine, because that is within the realm of visual art, that pleasure is in the visual.

I'm arguing against a different position. I'm not a fan of Rothko but if you are, for the visual effects he produces, well I have no problem with that. Here is definitely just a matter of differing taste. When someone claims that silence is a work of musical art, however, that is not a matter of taste, but a matter of severe error of judgment of the category of music and perhaps deception and malevolence.

>it's interesting because you think you don't see anything when you look at abstract art.
I don't think that. What I think is that many people are praising abstract visual art (abstract and visual being kind of at odds, by the way) for things which cannot be seen. "I like Rothko's Untitled 1960 for its employment of color" — a valid judgment. "I like Rothko's Untitled 1960 for its ability to penetrate the human experience and show us what the human mind is like in all its naked glory" — complete bullshit, obvious signs of deep error or treachery. And there are critics who say shit like that, you better believe it.

>you ought to not be able to appreciate painting at all once you've seen a high definition photograph.
This is true. Proof? Well, painting is pretty much dead now, isn't it?

[Anonymous No.10723515]

>>10723453
>you end up seeing "meaning" and "ideas" and "human destruction" rather than the raw emotion of the experience
this is how I feel about your attitude to modernism.

[Anonymous No.10723541]

>>10723128
Bouguereau's humans always look like models (prostitutes) placed on top of the background. His figures aren't the characters they are supposed to represent, they always look like some woman dressed up as that character. He never captures the true spirit of the character, he just depicts the model posing for him.

Take The Wave for example. I mean just look at her, she's in a stiff awkward pose, and her personality is not that of some carefree lady on the beach, or some dea goddess, she's just a woman modelling for Bouguereau. And she doesn't even seem that happy to be doing it.

Look at the sands around the hands too, have you ever seen sand form such a hard right angle? He has clearly painted the table he had the model sitting on, and tried to add the add the sand to it after the fact. But because the model had her hands on the edge of the table, he had to add that little sand shelf so the figure's hands could match the model's hands resting at the edge of the table.

And look at the wave itself. Really it looks like a painted backdrop, not a real wave at the ocean.

The overall impression you get of this painting, similar to many Bouguereaus is a model posing in front of a background. Not a mythological character in some scene, just a model that has been pasted onto a background, she doesn't belong in the world, she doesn't interact with it, she's just a girl posing for a painting with a background behind her.

[Anonymous No.10723542]

>>10723489
>oh I see, so he is politicising art.
He's not talking about any work of art there. He's not saying "all art is political" either. In fact, what he's saying is, is that art becomes increasingly about the political, or the scientific, or the mechanical, depending on where you're coming from, and the higher and more accurate understanding of art lies in the higher and more wholesome men.

>he is demonstrating the process of Seeing, by making an artwork that consists only of Seeing.
All painters make artwork that consists only of Seeing — it's just the uneducated who must struggle to learn the content who think otherwise. Duchamp is not doing anything special here.

>literally anything you look at can be considered as art.
The process of creation however can't be separated from the enterprise. Art is creative, of the man-made. Something in nature is not art.

>which is why I find it strange that you keep talking about tradition, which cannot be Seen and has no significant form.
I am talking about tradition because it is the loss of such which causes men like Duchamp to get away with what he does. He wipes away tradition and the people around him who have disconnected from it as well see nothing wrong with a urinal or putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

>and you've once again introduced something into the appreciation of art which is not form, or Seeing: education about mythology.
Misreading. Read my post again. *I* don't introduce it, other people do.

[Anonymous No.10723552]

My problem with Duchamp is he didn't really make the urinal, someone else did. I can certainly appreciate the design of a urinal, and I wouldn't object to it being in a museum, but the credited artist should be the person who designed the urinal, and a subcredit to the person who manufactured it, not just some joker who took someone else's thing and put it in the museum.

It's the same with Lichtenstein. I like comic books, so yeah go ahead and put a comic panel in a museum, that's fine. Just please credit the original artist, not the guy who copied it and put in a museum.

[Anonymous No.10723610]

>>10723515
You see that in my attitude towards modernism, but not in modernism itself?

Duchamp, visual artist. He sets out to create visual art. He doesn't create anything, he instead takes a urinal and puts it on display. "But it has a visual component and is pleasant to look at, making it visual art by definition," is the justification from his fans.

Except it's not pleasant to look at. There is in fact, nothing to really look at. He didn't create it, either. And even if it has a "visual component," it's so dumbed down that it doesn't incite aesthetic emotion in anyone except maybe third worlders who wish they had modern plumbing, of which the visual component has little to do with their emotion towards it. With no aesthetic emotion present, one can't call it art without lying through their teeth.

[Anonymous No.10723639]

>>10723500
>"I like Rothko's Untitled 1960 for its employment of color" — a valid judgment. "I like Rothko's Untitled 1960 for its ability to penetrate the human experience and show us what the human mind is like in all its naked glory" — complete bullshit, obvious signs of deep error or treachery.

If the only valid judgement of art is by its employment of colour, why have you mentioned mythology? why have you mentioned tradition? why do you think representation is so important? none of those things are colours. sounds like a deep error to me.

>When someone claims that silence is a work of musical art, however, that is not a matter of taste, but a matter of severe error of judgment of the category of music
it's not a work of musical art, it is a work consisting entirely of Listening. if aesthetic emotion in visual art is drawn from Seeing, then aesthetic emotion in music is drawn from Listening. a work that is nothing but Listening does not fall into the category of music and is not intended to, instead it is supposed to remind you what music is, fundamentally.


>you ought to not be able to appreciate painting at all once you've seen a high definition photograph.
>This is true.
so... why do you keep banging on about John William Waterhouse, Edmund Blair Leighton, Frank Dicksee, Maxfield Paris and William-Adolphe Bougeureau? they're obsolete, they're outdated, you can't appreciate them and neither can anyone else.

and if photography is better than painting because it's more detailed, then reality is even better because it's even more detailed - there's even a third dimension - so in fact painting was obsolete from the beginning. we should never have started making art in the first place, we should just have looked at the things around us.

in other words, art is Seeing, and it doesn't matter what you See.

might as well be a urinal as anything else, don't you think?

[Anonymous No.10723648]

>>10723541
oh fuck, that really is bad.

[Anonymous No.10723677]

>>10723639
>[Silence] is a work consisting entirely of Listening.
I fear you may have dain bramage, for there is nothing being listened to in silence. It's time to stop thinking for once and actually experience life for yourself.

[Anonymous No.10723706]

>>10723541
I agree with everything you said about that painting but I still like some of his other works. He has a sort of decadent taste for perfect shapes and poses which resonates with muh dick

[Anonymous No.10723737]

>>10723610
>Duchamp, visual artist. He sets out to create visual art.
not really. he sets out to create something that isn't art because art is dead because art is a meaningless category, and he uses visual means to do so.

>"But it has a visual component and is pleasant to look at, making it visual art by definition," is the justification from his fans.
I've told you I don't know how many times that the entire point is that it isn't pleasant to look at, nor is it unpleasant to look at, it is simply to look at.

>Except it's not pleasant to look at. There is in fact, nothing to really look at. He didn't create it, either. And even if it has a "visual component," it's so dumbed down that it doesn't incite aesthetic emotion in anyone
that's the entire point, stop saying it as if it's an insight. that's like me saying Michaelangelo is massively overrated because David is just a big piece of rock that looks exactly like an oversized man.

>With no aesthetic emotion present, one can't call it art without lying through their teeth.
which is why it's anti-art. however, as you quite ably demonstrate, there's no consistent definition of art, no objective category which contains art and only art. art is entirely subjective, so it can't ever be "lying" to call something art, since there's no such thing as the truth about what art is.

[Anonymous No.10723751]

>>10723737
>art is dead
t. modernist academics

>I've told you I don't know how many times that the entire point is that it isn't pleasant to look at, nor is it unpleasant to look at, it is simply to look at.
Sorry, I forgot that it's "art" trying as hard as it possibly can to not be art in any way, since the notion makes so little sense even trying to think about it creates a vortex in my head.

>there's no consistent definition of art
>art is entirely subjective
t. modernist academics

[Anonymous No.10723768]

>>10723751
Also, the real answer to the thread is: the Duchamp of literature is, in fact, also Duchamp, since he has as much to do with literature as he does with art.

[Anonymous No.10723771]

>>10723677
>there's nothing being listened to in silence
Listening is an act of the listener and doesn't inherently require anything to be Played, though. and there isn't literal silence, there's ambient noise. 4'33" makes you Listen to that ambient noise, which is something you would normally not Listen to. capital-L Listening is an act in and of itself, not just a response to the act of composition or recital. much the same way with capital-S Seeing.

[Anonymous No.10723780]

>>10723751
>there's no consistent definition of art
>art is entirely subjective
t. you, since you have spent a very long time defending an inconsistent definition of art that is entirely subjective

[Anonymous No.10723802]

>>10723771
>Listening is an act of the listener and doesn't inherently require anything to be Played, though.

Makes as much sense as:

>Subjectiveness is an act of the subject and doesn't inherently require anything to be Observed, though.

i.e. it doesn't make sense. A concept that exists in a vacuum separate from reality only.

>4'33" makes you Listen to that ambient noise, which is something you would normally not Listen to.

That's not a "work" of music though because there is no creative musical effort in producing that noise. It is, once again, completely failing to understand the definitions of things.

[Anonymous No.10723832]

>>10723751
>the notion makes so little sense even trying to think about it creates a vortex in my head.
well it's a deliberate contradiction so that's appropriate. it's a vortex in my head as well, but I enjoy it.

plenty of things in the world are true but don't make any sense. did you ever learn any quantum mechanics? it's no easier to understand art than it is to understand an electron.

[Anonymous No.10723855]

>>10723802

>That's not a "work" of music though because there is no creative musical effort in producing that noise. It is, once again, completely failing to understand the definitions of things.

I already said its not a work of music. it isn't failing to understand the definitions of things at all. it's taking part of the experience of music - Listening - and separating it from the rest, in order to better understand what the experience of music is like.

[Anonymous No.10723866]

>>10723855
If it's not a work of music then it's not taking part of the experience of music. A song has a clear beginning and an end; the silence before and after are not part of the song.

[Anonymous No.10723868]

>>10723802
>Subjectiveness is an act of the subject and doesn't inherently require anything to be Observed

also true. if we step outside of the artistic context for a bit... for example, you hear a mysterious sound in your house and you wait, listening carefully in case it happens again, but it doesn't. what are you observing?

[Anonymous No.10723872]

>>10723866
>If it's not a work of music then it's not taking part of the experience of music.
so music isn't about Listening?

[Anonymous No.10723888]

>>10723872
Not just that, which is why this erroneous conclusion of yours exists and why it is erroneous. It derives a conclusion from incomplete data.

[Anonymous No.10723904]

>>10723868
>what are you observing?
Something else other than the sound you heard before.

[Anonymous No.10724028]

>>10723888
right, music is not just about Listening. but it is partly about Listening. 4'33" is entirely about Listening, which is why it isn't music, but is also why it contains part of the experience of music. get it yet?

>what are you observing?
>Something else other than the sound you heard before.
and in 4'33" you are Listening to something else other than music. it's the same situation. you prepare to hear something and do not hear it. but the state of preparing to hear something is not the same as the state of just hearing by default. the added sense of awareness, of Listening, makes 4'33" different from just silence. of course the aural impression is the same as any other four and a half minutes of silence, but the effect is different.

you yourself already think that Seeing something is different from just seeing it so I don't know why you're having such difficulty understanding that it's possible to enter the state of Seeing even when there is nothing in particular to be seen and the state of Listening even when there is nothing in particular to listen to.

[Anonymous No.10724212]

>>10723610
You seem unaware that the readymade wasn't Duchamp's only output. Are you willfully blind?

[Anonymous No.10724294]

>>10724212
>his bullshit is okay and you are wrong because he did create some stuff sometimes

[Anonymous No.10724384]

>>10724294
I didn't write that, you should get your eyes checked.

[Anonymous No.10724392]

>>10723832
>it's a vortex in my head as well, but I enjoy it.
>plenty of things in the world are true but don't make any sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io-ZbKfCkxg

[Anonymous No.10724425]

>>10724294
>I have no good explanation for my milquetoast artistic preferences and when people try to widen my horizons I will purposefully misunderstand them to avoid having to reevaluate an inconsistent and shallow definition of art which ultimately amounts simply to my own personal taste.

[Anonymous No.10724441]

>>10724392
"Anyone who says that they understand quantum mechanics does not understand quantum mechanics" - Richard Feynman

same thing with art.

[Anonymous No.10724749]

>>10717899
total pleb

[Anonymous No.10724902]

>>10723639
Actually go see those paintings in person mate; they inspire a terror and depression so great, the atmosphere in that room at the tate is palpable.

[Anonymous No.10724918]

>>10724902
for
>>10723500

[Anonymous No.10725000]

César Aira maybe. At least he wrote a weird essay or two on Duchamp.
"Duchamp in Mexico" is just about Aira finding and buying increasingly cheaper copies of a Duchamp book in Mexico and concluding, via some very sketchy calculations, that he’s saving Millions.

[Anonymous No.10725020]

>>10724902
yeah I posted that because I went and saw them (again) this weekend. I stayed for a while and just let them kind of happen to me. after 20 minutes I was welling up... really incredible pieces.

[Anonymous No.10725315]

>>10724902
I don't share the same aesthetic as you do.

[Anonymous No.10725359]

>>10725315
nothing ventured, nothing gained.

[Anonymous No.10725997]

>>10725359
Nothing studied, "b-but nothing is definable so why read" :^)

[Anonymous No.10726044]

>>10725997
What? You make no sense.

[Anonymous No.10726207]

>>10726044
>You make no sense.
Nothing I've said makes sense according to all the ill-read people on this board, which is precisely the problem here, and why people think absolutely retarded shit like "art is undefinable" or "art cannot be understood". Yes, a concept, enterprise, and tradition humans invented is undefinable and cannot be understood. What a wonderful yet very predictable conclusion from minds who think in inverse terms for everything and who don't actually read anything except trash written by other people who didn't read anything.

[Anonymous No.10726229]

>>10726207
>I'm a victim and people don't read the books I like

[Anonymous No.10726275]

>>10724028
>it isn't music, but it contains part of the experience of music.
>in 4'33" you are Listening to something else other than music.

It's all or none. There's no "partly" "of". It is either music or it isn't. And in reality 4'33" is not, and only can be said to be in the realm of inverted (read: incorrectly used) language (read: fantasyland), and any theory of art that incorporates something which is not art is a less accurate theory.

So stupid and pointless; anyone with clear senses can realize the absolute stupidity of your argument. "not-music is music." Unbelievable.

[Anonymous No.10726294]

>>10726207
Lad, it is precisely because I am well read in aesthetics and art theory that I INSIST that art can't be properly defined. Just take a loot at Danto ,the man spent his life trying to do it, died and nothing changed.
You think your definition of art works because you start from your taste and then create a definition in which it fits, but you ignore art you dislike as non-art, a very dishonest endeavour.
You can requote Schiller all you want, but the matter of the fact is that aesthetics have moved beyond him, and that his own aesthetic definition is extremely limited, considering he was like the second or third "canonical" aesthetician.

[Anonymous No.10726306]

>>10726275
From what I understand, anon's argument is more along the lines of "listening is music-making".

[Anonymous No.10726327]

>>10717116
>cheap retinal art
Says the man unable to see
Very sad, indeed

[Anonymous No.10726340]

>>10726294
If art, a human invention, cannot be properly defined, then how can any human invention (like, for example, WORDS) be said to ever be properly defined? Can nothing be defined?

There is no word in any human language that can be properly defined. It is all undefinable, even the word undefinable. You heard it here first.

>aesthetics have moved beyond him
It has "moved beyond him" in the sense that less educated people have mangled the concept until it is, indeed, undefinable, at least to people who are also less educated. However, it remains definable and in fact defined. The aesthetic theory of his, while perhaps refined since his time, has lasted, and continues to be proven every single day by reality itself, as there is so much art being made today driven by this aesthetic sense in mind (all of which you idiots wouldn't even count as art). The latest stage in this theory (not that there are others)? Pic related.

[Anonymous No.10726341]

>>10726327
Would you care to share what you see in this picture?

[Anonymous No.10726386]

>>10726327
this

Duchamp was an autistic prankster taken too seriously by an artistic establishment that valued subversion above everything else

There's inherent value to be found in his work, but the aesthetic wildfire he and people like Greenberg have quickstarted has quite literally paralyzed the fine arts, turning it into a glass bead game more alienating than the publications of the most hermetic department in an ivory tower

[Anonymous No.10726399]

>>10726207
>Yes, a concept, enterprise, and tradition humans invented is undefinable and cannot be understood.
art (the enterprise) and art (the tradition) are two very different things, for a start. you're so hung up on tradition. I think you would be able to have purely aesthetic experiences much better if you tried doing it without hundreds of years worth of other people's ideas about art weighing down on you all the time.

that doesn't have to mean that the paintings of tradition are bad. you can still have a personal aesthetic experience with Bougeureau any time you like. but you should do it on your own terms. do it because you find the significant forms innately pleasing.

you don't like the idea of people being told how to feel about a painting but your insistence on defining art by tradition does exactly that.

[Anonymous No.10726400]

>>10726386
>There's inherent value to be found in his work
pray tell

[Anonymous No.10726403]

>>10726327
you posted the shitties painting you could have possibly posted

[Anonymous No.10726435]

>>10726399
>you're so hung up on tradition.
You say "hung up" but looking to the historical tradition of something is literally what studying something is about. The history of a thing is essential to understanding it. You refuse to consider this, obviously, since it would dismantle your argument entirely.

>do it because you find the significant forms innately pleasing.
Retard, I DO. At what point did you come to the conclusion that I didn't? You aren't listening. I'm not like you; I don't call things which I have not personally felt an aesthetic emotion for art.

[Anonymous No.10726438]

>>10726340
Asking 'what is art' is just asking 'what is'.

[Anonymous No.10726466]

>>10726386
>>10726400
Duchamp literally hated art. He has stated so many times.

He was an anarchist, an intellectual and a genius satirist in a virulent quest to troll the art world as hardest as possible. The cubists and futurists didn't want to hang out with him, so he set out on destroying their whole playground.

Anti-art as art. Lack of aesthetics as the ultimate aesthetic: art that neither pleases or displeases the senses. The ultimate joke on art curators, artists, museums, the establishment and art itself. A vitriolic assault of rationality on the senses.

If you understand where the Modernists were coming from, it's self-evident why someone like Duchamp became so huge (perhaps the most influential modernist after Picasso).

[Anonymous No.10726487]

>>10726275
>"not-music is music."
4'33'' is not music. music involves the communication of human emotion using the sound of instruments, and as such the appreciation of musical aesthetics requires us to Listen. this action Listening is in some sense distinct from ordinary listening because it involves trying to detect musical forms in order to have an aesthetic experience.

4'33'' is not music. what 4'33'' does, or would do if you were to let it, is to make you start Listening to the silence. this is distinct from listening to the silence because it involves trying to detect musical forms in order to have an aesthetic experience.

4'33'' is not music. there are no musical forms. so you are just Listening without having any particular form to contemplate. you might think this is a useless excercise, but that's because to you, listening to music means detecting pre-approved patterns which you know other people already like, just a status symbol in the musical subculture you most admire. if you were Listening to music instead and wanted to know why, you would be interested in what the faculty of Listening actually is, and you would want, just once or twice, to try Listening without the distraction of music.

4'33' is not music.

[Anonymous No.10726537]

>>10726435
>finding significant forms innately pleasing
>looking to the historical tradition

what's so innate about it if you have to study before you know what to feel?

please note I am not telling you that the art you like is bad, or does not have significant form. quite plainly it does. what I'm saying is that if you didn't force yourself to study tradition and instead tried to discove art on your own terms, you'd be able to enjoy all that art and more. you would get a larger number and broader range of aesthetic experiences of significant forms, and it would be much more enjoyable than all this anger that you feel you have to defend tradtion with. tradition! not even your own ideas, just something you read in a book. but you take it so personally.

[Anonymous No.10726546]

>>10726466
>Duchamp literally hated art. He has stated so many times.
What he said precisely is that he didn't believe in art but believed in artists.

[Anonymous No.10726585]

>>10726546
and
"No, no the word 'anti' annoys me a little, because whether you are anti or for, it's two sides of the same thing. And I would like to be completely - I don't know what you say - nonexistent, instead of being for or against… The idea of the artist as a sort of superman is comparatively recent. This I was going against. In fact, since I've stopped my artistic activity, I feel that I'm against this attitude of reverence the world has. Art, etymologically speaking, means to 'make.' Everybody is making, not only artists, and maybe in coming centuries there will be a making without the noticing"

[Anonymous No.10726591]

>>10726435
>I'm not like you; I don't call things which I have not personally felt an aesthetic emotion for art.
Please, don't act like people who appreciate Duchamp's artwork are literally saying the urinal is the beautiful thing. also have some snowflake points

[Anonymous No.10726623]

>>10726585
>And I would like to be completely - I don't know what you say - nonexistent, instead of being for or against…
*proceeds to put a mustache on the Mona Lisa*

[Anonymous No.10726631]

>>10726623
what a god

[Anonymous No.10726634]

>>10726623
your insults make less and less sense desu

[Anonymous No.10726651]

>>10726623
>mfw

[Anonymous No.10726654]

>>10726623
You're outraged like he did it on the real painting. Get a fucking grip, idiot.

[Anonymous No.10726661]

>>10726654
That's not an outrage, just pointing out that that's not exactly being "nonexistent" about anything.

[Anonymous No.10726668]

All Duchamp and his buddies did was eliminate essentialism from their sculptures and whatever they produced in other visual arts.

Literature can not, by definition, get rid of essentialism, because it's made up of words. Some modern authors have tried to either subvert or bypass that (and have even been succesful to some degree, like Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), but ultimately haven't had a lasting impact on literature. Literature is Platonist.

[Anonymous No.10726669]

>>10726661
All of a sudden you don't understand how ideals work? Go back.

[Anonymous No.10726674]

>>10726651
genius, absoutely genius, what a madman

how did he come up with this. and then the gall to go and DO IT
duchamps was an absolute intellectual unit, in awe at the creative spirit of the lad

[Anonymous No.10726691]

>>10726661
The point of LHOOQ was that he took a print that had no artistic value, and by doodling on it, made it very valuable. Man ray did the equal and opposite by taking everyday items like a clothes iron and gluing tacks to them. You may not think it is art, but it has purpose.

[Anonymous No.10726746]

>>10726691
it's also a dirty pun, Shakespeare would be proud.

[Anonymous No.10726768]

>>10726631
>>10726674
this but ironically

[Anonymous No.10726775]

>>10726746
What is the pun? I never picked up on it

[Anonymous No.10726815]

>>10726537
>what's so innate about it if you have to study before you know what to feel?

"before you know what to feel" is not how the act works at all. Aesthetic emotion creeps up on you, as in, it happens to you; you are conscious as it happens, but only of the external thing, not of it happening to you in the moment.

"innately pleasing" is also an imprecise wording. There are no innate properties in this world. "personally pleasing" is better. "pleasing in the experience" is better. To understand the experience, you must understand yourself and the senses you are using and precisely what external thing you are sensing. If you are sensing something not in the work, you are deriving aesthetic emotion from something external other than the work, or maybe just something else internal. Either way, you are not experiencing the work, but something else.

This problem is a philosophical one now. It has to do with perspectivism. Perspectivism does not render life meaningless; it does not mean you can think whatever you'd like and be equally right about it as anyone else; and it certainly does not mean that things can be any other things. Perspectivism, instead, means that the world is a mirror of yourself. If life is meaningless to you, it's not that life is meaningless, but that you feel it to be so; you, in fact, are meaningless. Study of history and of whatever subject of interest builds onto the unconscious of a person and thus makes their perspective more complex, more accurate to the truth, more powerful. The more complex and accurate and powerful a perspective is, the different things it receives an aesthetic emotion from.

>what I'm saying is that if you didn't force yourself to study tradition and instead tried to discove art on your own terms, you'd be able to enjoy all that art and more.
That may be true, but I don't want to enjoy art that people who are uneducated enjoy. And if I stripped away my education, there wouldn't be a "larger number and broader range of aesthetic experiences" available to me, just a different kind, a kind that, now that I am educated, I can see is coarser and slower and less interesting.

>not even your own ideas, just something you read in a book.
They are my own ideas, in a sense. Like art, I don't refer to and express gratitude to a person and their idea unless I myself have come to understand what they understood in order to develop the idea. I give credit where due of course.

[Anonymous No.10726829]

>>10726775

[Anonymous No.10726856]

>ugh I hateeee the bourgeoisie soo much!!!
>*proceeds to exhibit a bicycle wheel and an urinal*
>LIKE CLOSE YOUR EYES MON FRERE PRETTY COLORS AIN'T SHIT ART HAS TO MAKE YOU THINK DESU
>*defaces the monalisa*
>heh bet you didn't see that coming right?
>*pseud redditors worldwide applaud you*
>*retires to pursue the dullest of all intellectual activities*
>heh nothing personnel...bougie

[Anonymous No.10726870]

>>10726829
so what?

[Anonymous No.10726909]

>>10726829
I did not know that. Thanks. I studied Duchamp in college around 20 years ago and had no idea.

[Anonymous No.10726928]

>>10726870
if you don't enjoy gratuitous puns you'll never really understand poetry, let alone art.

[Anonymous No.10726969]

>>10726909
see also
>>10717193

[Anonymous No.10726981]

Baudrillard? Iunno man....

And I don't necessarily make that connection as a criticism

[Anonymous No.10727277]

>>10726815
>"before you know what to feel" is not how the act works at all. Aesthetic emotion creeps up on you, as in, it happens to you; you are conscious as it happens, but only of the external thing, not of it happening to you in the moment.
>"innately pleasing" is also an imprecise wording. There are no innate properties in this world. "personally pleasing" is better. "pleasing in the experience" is better. To understand the experience, you must understand yourself and the senses you are using and precisely what external thing you are sensing. If you are sensing something not in the work, you are deriving aesthetic emotion from something external other than the work, or maybe just something else internal. Either way, you are not experiencing the work, but something else.

I agree with all this and since you didn't specify visual aesthetic I don't think Duchamp would disagree with you - his idea of an aesthetic reaction is broader than yours but that doesn't mean he isn't aiming for one.

And the readymades aren't his whole body of work. He spent eight years on The Large Glass and longer on Etant Donnes, and whether they please you personally or not, they clearly aren't aesthetically neutral.

He said that he didn't like "retinal art" but I think it's telling that his major late works do clearly use visual forms to stimulate aesthetic reactions, significant form comes back into the equation for him.

>It has to do with perspectivism. Perspectivism does not render life meaningless; it does not mean you can think whatever you'd like and be equally right about it as anyone else; and it certainly does not mean that things can be any other things. Perspectivism, instead, means that the world is a mirror of yourself. If life is meaningless to you, it's not that life is meaningless, but that you feel it to be so; you, in fact, are meaningless. Study of history and of whatever subject of interest builds onto the unconscious of a person and thus makes their perspective more complex, more accurate to the truth, more powerful.

I couldn't have said it better and I unironically agree with evey word.

In my opinion, understanding what Duchamp was doing with readymades only adds to the complexity and accuracy and power of my Seeing.

> I don't want to enjoy art that people who are uneducated enjoy.

it's not a zero sum game. you can enjoy more than one thing at once. You won't suddenly stop liking the realists if you enjoy one Picasso or whatever. thinking for a while about why exactly it is that Rothko can make you feel so much with just paint won't bring on a nihilist rejection of all principles. you'll still understand the Masters and why they look so good, you'll still seek out significant form. you won't go Blind.

you might even find you enjoy one or two. and those would be new aesthetic experiences, against which you can test your own idea of what is "pleasing in the experience" - because that's how to gradually change it like a scientific theory.

[Anonymous No.10727524]

>>10718162
Really? I googled his name + poems and a poetry foundation page comes up as the first thing with links to some of his poems.

[Anonymous No.10727669]

>>10727277
>In my opinion, understanding what Duchamp was doing with readymades only adds to the complexity and accuracy and power of my Seeing.

I should expand on this I guess.

What the readymades do is invite you to use your Seeing capacity without the innately aesthetic object that would usually stimulate a response. because initially

>Aesthetic emotion creeps up on you

and you only start Seeing once an aesthetic object has stimulated you to. Duchamp wants you to start Seeing without that stimulus. He isn't asking you to stop Seeing anything or to pretend that you have been inspired by the object. He's showing you that you can, if you choose, switch on the aesthetic sense of your own volition, without an aesthetic object and without artistic context. as you said

>To understand the experience, you must understand yourself and the senses you are using.

and the readymades are an attempt to show you something about how you interact with art, namely that you play an active part in generating the aesthetic sensation.

[Anonymous No.10727869]

>>10719037
Look at the size of this absolute unit.

[Anonymous No.10727879]

>>10712623
Robert Anton Wilson

>pastiche, pop, underground fame, accessible art,

[Anonymous No.10727920]

>>10727669
OK still me but I probably ought to clarify that

>you play an active part in generating the aesthetic sensation.

does not mean that you generate an aesthetic sensation out of nowhere and apply it to Fountain: readymades are meant to not produce any aesthetic sensation.

what you should notice, however, is that you had begun Seeing, i.e. you had prepared yourself to feel aesthetic responses to an object, before discovering that there was nothing to see. this means Seeing is not a passive response that can be generated only by a certain set of objects, or only by objects of a certain nature. rather, Seeing is a state of active involvement in the perception of the object.

if you practise Seeing without waiting for the aesthetic emotion to creep up on you first, then you will start to see aesthetic forms everywhere.

another way to learn the same thing would be to take up photography.

[Anonymous No.10728247]

>>10726651
that's Dali

[Anonymous No.10729273]

>>10728247
>mfw

[Anonymous No.10729809]

>both modern and postmodern
>abandoned aesthetics as much as possible
>obsessed with chess
>surprising use of bicycles
>stylish as fuck

it's Beckett.

[Anonymous No.10729892]

>>10727277
>his idea of an aesthetic reaction is broader than yours

I'm extremely skeptical of the word "broader" because the fruits of his labor don't appear to represent this. His "visual art" does not seem very visual. Whatever enjoyment there is to be had in his work seems to exist primarily outside of its visual elements or at least rely significantly on something outside, even for his works like Nude Descending Staircase, The Large Glass and Etant Donnes. The influence from the visual appears secondary both for him and in the experience of it. And there is just nothing visually pleasing about the urinal at all (not to mention, he didn't make it, preventing it from even being considered a "work" reasonably), which tells me even more about the other works and what he may have been focused on more when creating them; say what you want about the urinal's curves, it's not nearly enough to provoke anything in me, even when put on display. In fact, I detest people who feel provoked by objects, even the everyday ones, merely because they are on display, which I do sense is part of what Duchamp was challenging.

To me, it seems more like Duchamp's idea of the aesthetic is not "broader" but misplaced. Because aesthetic emotion isn't drawn from the visual in his work, it can't be said that his art is visual art. Maybe he did feel an aesthetic emotion for something and maybe people who like Duchamp do as well. But it's apparent that wherever that emotion comes from, it's not primarily provoked by the visual.

>>10727669
>He's showing you that you can, if you choose, switch on the aesthetic sense of your own volition, without an aesthetic object and without artistic context.
Makes sense. But, isn't that a little at odds with the whole enterprise of art? The enterprise of art, which has as its goal: to create objects which produce aesthetic emotion. Duchamp, though, isn't creating objects that produce this. He is deliberately creating objects that do not produce this, in order to get people to produce it themselves. While I see his point, it's not actually the point of the arts... it has derailed a bit off track. This line

>if you practise Seeing without waiting for the aesthetic emotion to creep up on you first, then you will start to see aesthetic forms everywhere.

is something that I swear I've read while exploring Buddhist or Vedic scripture. While it is the case (I used to meditate and had my phase with being a student of Bodhidharma) I think that in the end, it is suppression, not extension. Not "broader" but "narrower."

If Duchamp was sincere and not motivated to derail anything, then I would say that he should have just stopped thinking about shit for a little, sometimes you can overthink things... you obscure insight with your thought. And then you end up placing a urinal on display and are no longer able to see why this is a mild form of insanity.

[Anonymous No.10729948]

>Fine arts
To be even less relevant than contemporary literature: now, thats an achievement

[Anonymous No.10730051]

1/2

>>10729892
>His "visual art" does not seem very visual. Whatever enjoyment there is to be had in his work seems to exist primarily outside of its visual elements or at least rely significantly on something outside, even for his works like Nude Descending Staircase, The Large Glass and Etant Donnes. The influence from the visual appears secondary both for him and in the experience of it.

well that's exactly what I mean by his idea of aesthetic being broader than yours. it includes things that are not simply visual. although he is a visual artist in the sense that he uses primarily visual stimuli as his art, the feelings these stimuli convey are not primarily visual themselves. also by "his idea of an aesthetic reaction" I don't necessarily mean those that he preferred, since he openly disliked retinal art. but clearly he thought that the retinal compnent of art did nevertheless involve an aesthetic reaction, otherwise he wouldn't have spent so much time trying to find readymades in which that reaction was absent.

>And there is just nothing visually pleasing about the urinal at all (not to mention, he didn't make it, preventing it from even being considered a "work" reasonably), which tells me even more about the other works and what he may have been focused on more when creating them; say what you want about the urinal's curves, it's not nearly enough to provoke anything in me, even when put on display.

like I said many times, the urinal is not meant to be visually pleasing, it is explicitly meant NOT to provoke anything in you.

>In fact, I detest people who feel provoked by objects, even the everyday ones, merely because they are on display, which I do sense is part of what Duchamp was challenging.

right, and the point of Fountain is that even though it is on display, you should not be provoked by it. people who think Fountain is meant to be aesthetic have totally missed the point and don't understand Duchamp.

>Because aesthetic emotion isn't drawn from the visual in his work, it can't be said that his art is visual art.

he didn't want to be, he had renounced retinal art. remember that he doesn't define art, and so has no reason to restrict it to the visual in the first place. he experimented with other modes of communication that can be stimulated by objects that are visually observed.

>To me, it seems more like Duchamp's idea of the aesthetic is not "broader" but misplaced.

in a sense I agree, because I think the retinal component of art is extremely important and should not _in general_ be removed from art. but regardless of whether he personally pursued it as a primary goal of art, Duchamp clearly still believes visual form invokes an aesthetic reaction.

since Duchamp doesn't define art, what he treats as art must still contain all that was art previously. he adds to the possibilities of art, and doesn't take away.

[Anonymous No.10730183]

2/2

>>10729892
>The enterprise of art, which has as its goal: to create objects which produce aesthetic emotion.

creating objects which produce aesthetic emotion by definition requires being able to detect aesthetic emotion in objects.

detecting aesthetic emotion in objects involves active use of the faculty of Seeing.

Seeing can be practised, using aesthetic objects presented as art - this is what you do - but _additionally_ Seeing can be practised as a mode of viewing in its own right.

>He is deliberately creating objects that do not produce this, in order to get people to produce it themselves.

again, you aren't meant to produce an aesthetic reaction to Fountain itself. you are supposed to recognise that you have entered the mode of Seeing, and also that there is nothing to See. then you are supposed to realise that if you enter the mode of Seeing at another time, you may discover unespected aesthetic reactions in other things.

it was very hard for Duchamp to find readymades that he considered to be aesthetically neutral, which implies that he himself saw aesthetic reactions in almost every object he came across, which is what I mean by photography being a similar endeavour.

>this is a mild form of insanity.

I don't disagree, he was certainly more than a little mad, but it was an extremely insightful madness, I think. I also don't think he was unaware of it.

[Anonymous No.10730259]

>>10730183
shit, attached Bicycle Wheel and forgot to say why.

this is what Duchamp said about it:

"It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live. Probably, to help your ideas come out of your head. To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of flames"

and

"It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or describing anything. No nothing like that..."


It wasn't shown in a gallery until 1951, 35+ years after it was made - this is something Duchamp did simply to amuse himself. Urinals in galleries aside, you have to be a bit mad to even have the idea of putting a bicycle wheel on a stool in the first place, let alone use it as an aid to meditation.

I kind of want to make one myself.

[Anonymous No.10730288]

>>10729948
Im going to study fine arts next year.
What am i in for?

[Anonymous No.10730430]

>>10712623
Henry Miller, i think

[Anonymous No.10730439]

>>10730288
Unemployment

[Anonymous No.10730478]

>>10730439
At least ill get a hipster gf

[Anonymous No.10731342]

>>10730430
why?

[Anonymous No.10732848]

>>10730478
Don't be so sure, anon.