When I go to an art museum, I want to see the craziest shit they can throw at me. I like looking at the old paintings and seeing the layers of paint and admiring the talent that went into it, but throw something titled Red #2 or Untitled and shit is about to get real. I want to have to figure out if there is actually art there or not. I want to look at the goddamn wall and think it’s art and have the curator tell me that it’s just a wall. I want the curator to tell me a dick joke and then tell me it’s part of an art exhibit. I want to eat pasta and look at paintings of absolutely nothing.
I love how, more than a century after some French alcoholic put a toilet in an art gallery, artists have been continually asking the question “what is art, really?” only to discover the answer is that high art is a way for bored rich people to simulate meaning in their lives by turning the entire exercise into a contest of personal popularity and ego.
They emptied their own golem of meaning and that’s why empty canvases are now considered art.
actually the point of duchamps fountain was to make idiots mad, which it still does a hundred fucking years later
I’m tired of it, but we keep seeing variations of the toilet because it keeps working.
Wealthy New York aristocrats using their access to money to insist they’re the edgy cool provocative rebels questioning power does annoy me, it’s true.
- Jean Baudrillard, The Art Auction