REAL ART
Artists name urinal most
influential work of modern art

What, it's not "Stairway to Heaven?" From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The poll of 500 arts figures ranked French surrealist Marcel Duchamp's 1917 piece Fountain -- an ordinary white, porcelain urinal -- more influential than Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Andy Warhol's screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Guernica, Picasso's searing depiction of the devastation of war.

Duchamp pioneered the use of everyday objects as art, an aesthetic that questioned the nature of art itself.

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There is an artist named Jeff Koons who essentially does the same thing that Marcel Duchamp was doing nearly a century ago. That is, Koons appropriates objects from everyday life and pop culture, places them in a formal setting, and calls them art. He's been very successful at getting people to believe that these objects are, indeed, art, and he's been very successful at getting people to pay enormous sums to own these objects. In the New York modern art scene, Koons is a superstar.

Of course he's full of shit.

Duchamp, working within the dada art movement, was rebelling against what were then the prevailing formal and rigid definitions of both culture and art. His work attacked the very heart of early 20th century aesthetics. In that context, presenting an everyday object as art was quite extraordinary and revolutionary, and, of course, that revolution was eventually won--by the late 1950s, Andy Warhol was painting pictures of Cambell's soup cans and making silk screens of Marilyn Monroe photos; Warhol's work was, and still is, wildly popular. The ordinary object, the common image, ultimately became a part of what is now Western Civilization's prevailing multi-faceted system of aesthetics. In other words, it's old hat.

Koons' work, in this era, is really nothing more that what one might find on display in the average high school art class. So why is his work so highly esteemed? The bottom line is that the "serious" art world has run out of ideas; like a dopey puppy, it's chasing its own intellectual tail, repackaging worn out concepts, using five dollar words in tandem with self-perpetuating elite hipsterism to justify its artistic defecations, as this Koons-glorifying essay by Generation X writer Douglas Coupland illustrates:

Jeff Koons: Getting It

Well, in the most respectful way, Koons can seem like a joke - one either gets Koons or one doesn't. If you do, you do, and if you don't, you don't. And it seems that half the artworld does (and loves his work), and half the artworld doesn't (and stares uncomprehendingly at vacuum cleaners in plexiglass cases, balloon bunnies and porcelain puppies), and the twain will never meet.

Now, many artists divide opinion, so why should this reaction to Koons be worth mentioning? The simple fact is that Koons doesn't just divide opinion; he causes real animosity, blazing rows. And the reason for this also stems from his work's joke-like qualities: not only do some people not 'get' it, but in not getting it they also assume that they're being made to look a fool.

And

Yet Koons' work was, and remains, liberating for many art students and artists because he is still the crucial bridge between the ironic and post-ironic worlds. Most older artists have chosen to opt out of the ironic/post-ironic discourse ('Let the damn kids figure it out'), but for the young, the irony/post-irony discourse is as common as oxygen, and to ignore it is to will irrelevance onto oneself. But the consensus seems to be mounting in both the art and literary worlds that, in order to jump dimensions, one has to play with all polarities of irony: heartfelt confession morphing into old sitcom punchlines morphing into Serzone blankness. In other words, being Jeff Koons.

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Crap. All crap. However, you can see between the lines the truth desperately trying to bubble through the sewage to the surface: Koons is a joke. Of course, Coupland tries to give this all an intellectual air. You see, it's a cool joke because it's playing on "the ironic/post-ironic discourse" and is therefore...well...man, I just don't buy it. It's a bunch of bullshit. I'll grant that Koons' work is interesting. I'd even go so far as to call it art. But is it great? Hell, no. It's tired and old, propped up by lousy, pseudo-intellectual apologists and art world elitists, the same people who have served to make art meaningless and inaccessable to the common man. The Koons crowd is evil, a self-proclaimed clique of New York cool, with about as much credibility as your typical middle school popular crowd of cheerleaders, football players, and pretty boys. The emperor wears no clothes.

Duchamp, however, was pretty F'ing great, if you ask me.

Crap Art


Jeff Koons' New Hoover Quik-Broom
& New Hoover Celebrity IV


Real Art


Marcel Duchamp's Fountain

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