The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

23 Tweets • 2023-02-02 •  See on Twitter

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Why did artists stop making art?

Michelangelo was commissioned in 1501 to create a
statue of David for Florence Cathedral.

Florence had recently become a republic again, and

David was supposed to embody the spirit of the city,
its democracy and values.

He was working for the city and the republic.

While in 1917 Marcel Duchamp, then living in
America, submitted his Fountain anonymously (under
the name Richard Mutt) to the first exhibition of New
York's Society of Independent Artists.

Unlike Michelangelo, Duchamp was just an individual

artist making a provocative statement.
And so Duchamp's Fountain isn't, on its own merits,
very interesting.

Much more compelling is the question of why

Duchamp did it in the first place. And, once he did,
why it was so influential.

Indeed, all modern conceptual art stems from

Duchamp's infamous urinal.
Part of the answer lies in one of Duchamp's earlier
paintings: Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, from
1912.

Taking plenty from Cubism and Futurism, two avant-

garde art European art movements of the age, his
inspiration for this painting was photography.
Just as AI has recently thrown up a host of new
challenges for art, photography once did the same.
Anybody with a camera could now do what once only
artists could.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire had recognised

photography as a potential threat to art way back in
the 1860s:
Duchamp was fascinated by it. His painting was
inspired by the photographs of Étienne-Jules Marey,
who had captured horses in motion over several
superimposed frames.

Duchamp even experimented with photography

himself, including his "Five Way Self Portrait".
Another way photography impacted art, perhaps even
more profoundly, is made clear in Duchamp's
irreverant L.H.O.O.Q.

Prints of famous paintings had been around for

centuries, but photography allowed the creation of
highly accurate ones on a scale previously impossible.
Suddenly *anybody* could own a print of the Mona
Lisa, or of any famous painting. Art's once limited
supply was now near infinite.

The old masterpieces were everywhere - even on

postcards - so why make new ones?

L.H.O.O.Q. seems like a bitter mockery of that fact.

The Fountain itself was one of the "readymade"
artworks created by Duchamp, where he took
everyday objects and simply called them art.

He wanted to turn art from an aesthetic craft into an

intellectual process. In his words this was about
appealling to the mind, not the eye.
But it was industrial mass-production as much as
photography that destabilised the world of art.

What were once artisinal objects that only a few

craftspeople could create were now everyday items,
available in department stores for anybody to buy and
take home.
And so when people very fairly point out that
Duchamp's Fountain (and much modern art that has
followed it) required no skill... they're right, and that
was the point.

The skills of individual artists had been swallowed up

by the possibilites of industrial manufacturing.
Rather than skill it was intellectual daring that would,
in Duchamp's mind, define the modern artist.

The public already had their masterpieces - so what

else did the artist, no longer needed, owe them?

That, at least, was one line of reasoning.

Marcel Duchamp, like many of his contemporaries,

was simply posing the question that had already been
asked (and answered) by technology.

What was the role of artist in modern society? They

had been challenged and perhaps even displaced.

Readymade art was a way of responding.

But related to all this was something happening on the
other side of the Atlantic. While Duchamp was
presenting his purely intellectual art in New York a war
was ravaging his homeland - France - and the rest of
Europe.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

The First World War was, for many people, a complete
betrayal - the world they had been brought up to
believe in, its art and values and culture, had led to a
conflict of unimaginable violence and desolation.

Artists, like so many, turned away from the past.

Duchamp himself soon becamely involved with the
fiercely anti-establishment Dadaist movement in
Europe, which was a direct response to the First
World War.

They rejected their society - its logic, its values, and its
aesthetics - and adopted Duchamp's self-proclaimed
"anti-art".
But, looking beyond their words, the art of a key
Dadaist member like Man Ray gives us some idea of
what interested - and frightened - them.

His drawings were more like industrial diagrams;

technology was fundamentally changing the world.
Is The Fountain art? Duchamp said it was anti-art, and
yet he presented it at an artistic exhibition.

Perhaps such intellectual jokes doesn't matter at all.

What really matters is that the Fountain speaks to its

age - art is always a barometer for society.

Michelangelo's David represents something

fundamental about Florence in the early 1500s.

And Duchamp's Fountain says much about the early

20th century, reeling from the social, political,
economic, and cultural consequences of rapid
technological progress and all out war.

None of this means the Fountain is an inevitable

conclusion - not everybody reacted to all of this in the
same way.

The Surrealists, for example, were also a direct

response to the First World War. But they continued to
paint with the methods of traditional art.
And, by a strange twist of fate, Auguste Rodin died in
the same year that Duchamp presented his Fountain.

Rodin, regarded as one of the greatest artists of his

age, was still working on the Gates of Hell at the time
of his death, and the Thinker was barely a decade old.
Duchamp's Fountain has been controversial ever
since its creation, and that reputation is sure to
endure.

Is it a great work of art? Is it even art? Well, it can

hardly be compared to Michelangelo's David.

But, as a sign of the times, it does what only art can

do.
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