art. art? art! ..

Duchampishly, Duchampian, Duchamping. Duchamp's importance is best seen as a reaction to the changes in art brought on by the Industrial Revolution and photography, which kicked off the contemporary struggles of art to remain relevant, interesting, and an audience draw: if you're surrounded by smooth surfaces, bright colors, perfect right angles, intricate patterns flawlessly etched in plastic, etc, whether all this is mass produced or not, art-that-you-make seems less special. One solution is to submit deliberately roughshod art as an indictment of capitalism, and another is to close institutions off from mass culture and practice incest.

People are going to produce art, just as they are going to worship God(s) and rear children, regardless of how 'contemporary' or evolved or self-aware their art might or might not seem, or whether or not others want to buy it when they can just order a Beanie Baby online. Art might be somewhat like jazz music: it requires some empathy to be an art fan, to put yourself in the artist's shoes; otherwise it just sounds like noodling.

Two things were important in Western art: 1) the Renaissance (identify "art"), and 2) the Industrial-Photographic Revolution (art is no longer rare, expensive, or difficult). Impressionism, abstract art, minimalism, surrealism, the avant garde, conceptual art, and relational aesthetics are all part of the Sisyphean project to Make Art Special Again. Conceptualism especially gets cheapened into a one-liner -- art amounting to a smirking sort of cleverness and a single "hook" that can be stated in a sentence.

Laziness is a real problem, in the avant garde, in minimalism, and on the computer. Unless you're some kind of genius, (digital) art makers (majors) do what they do because they can't do anything else. If they could make movies or video games or do interactive complex websites for companies then they would be doing that. David Hickey (art critic, RIP) said something similar about how if you're dyslexic, retarded, ADHD, etc, you end up in the art department, where there is no path to a viable moneymaking career. There's a narrative that "artists" do what they do because they choose it or are passionate about it, but that is not entirely true in all cases. I think often we're here because we have to be.

In other words: ever notice that they only call useless shit "art"? Industrial design, movies, videogames, etc, isnt "art," because it makes money and is wanted by society. The enterprise of institution-driven contemporary art is there to pick up the dregs.

natural stupidity ..

Artists have been prepared for artificial intelligence, such as it is, since the start of photography and industrial production; we already know we can't depict or fabricate as well as a machine. The solution has been, and will continue to be, to make art 'about' human creativity and in fact 'about' being human in and of itself, rather than assembling line and color. Duchamp wrote the latter off as "retinal art," and his conceptual revolution later lead to things like performance art and relational aesthetics: artists running around with green hair and bones in their noses, acting the part, to distract us from cameras making better images and factories making better objects.

I complain that Brad Pitt makes art and everyone pays attention only because he's a celebrity, but this is unavoidable -- in big art markets the name of the artist is what matters; no one would notice the Mona Lisa if a famous name were not on it and if it did not have its socio-cultural location. Maybe conceptually-flavored, university and gallery-driven art, which observing aliens would agree is less complex, generally, than 'mainstream' movies or video games or the Empire State Building, needs to be made by people in order for people to take an interest in it.

Computers can easily create images on their screens. One could print them out big and at great cost in order to get others to pay attention, but then the images would look like prints, which I guess is fine, but maybe you want more variety in your museum halls, and maybe you want noseboned greenhairs, venue, installation, etc, to augment the product so it stands above the Apple Macintosh you made it on.