Seeing music as the first of the arts to escape the Aristotelian task of imitating nature, writers from the late sixteenth century onwards (Schiller, Goethe, Schopenhauer, de Stael, Baudelaire, Hanslick, Whistler.) increasingly promoted its superiority over, and its power as a model for, the other arts. Until the fourteenth century the status of music was pitched far below that of painting, but by the eighteenth century the situation had effectively been reversed.
1968.ġ0 In spite of the later disavowals of some of the Fluxalumni, who echoed the Dadaists even in this retrospective redrawing of their own recent history.ġ1 George Antheil's Ballet Mechanique - in fact his entire composing and performing career from the early '20s to the mid '30s - would be exemplary, blending a repetitive machine aesthetic with Stravinsky's take on 'primitive' folk rhythms.ġ2 'All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music.' Walter Pater, 'The Renaissance,' 1873. Interviewed in 1962, Duchamp was already resigned to the new situation: 'When I discovered the readymades, I hoped to discourage the carnival of aestheticism I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their face as provocations, & now they are admiring their aesthetic beauty.'Ĩ Sometimes, it did seem to depend which side of the joke his public felt they were on: when Warhol sent look-alikes to stand in for him at university engagements, some of those attending became quite indignant - although his action seems entirely consistent with the Warhol TM brand in fact was even rather an exquisite instance of it.ĩ Clement Greenberg. Perhaps this accolade was intended as a slyly philosophical art event? But I think not. 1975ħ In 2004, it was voted the most influential artwork of the C20. If I single out Andy Warhol in the pages that follow, it is because it seems to me that he took cogniscence of the changed context of his borrowings in a way that many of his contemporaries did not, concentrating more on the conditions of meaning than on its production and insisting not on his own freedom so much as acting to expose the conditions of his confinement.Ħ Andy Warhol. I say anti-art, but anti-art and non-art seem confusingly to merge into one broad concept in this period - and of course by then Dada already belonged tacitly in the camp of art.ģ. Robert Motherwell's book, The Dada painters and poets was published in 1951 and is constantly referenced by artists of this generation, though surely it was more a symptom than a cause.Ģ. Even the idea that a mass-produced urinal (or bottle-rack, or snow shovel, or anything at all) might be an artwork might itself be accepted as an artwork now.ģ I will use this term of Peter Burger's to refer at least to Constructivism, Russian and Italian Futurism and Dada.Ĥ In Fluxartist Yoko Ono's case ('Bottoms,' 1966).ġ. In fact just the idea of an object might be an artwork (subsequent, exhibited, 'Fountains' were newly purchased from commercial outlets without in any way affecting the status of the work). Few today, however, dispute that Fountain was and is an artwork, or that, by implication, any object at all might be an artwork.
It is the concept of Fine Art that is thrown into crisis by the historic avant gardes, and it is the consequence of their critical challenge that I try to trace below.Ģ In 1913, Duchamp famously asked "Can one make works, which are not works of art?" In 1917, his assisted readymade, Fountain - a commercially mass-produced urinal that he had bought in a shop - was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists in New York, specifically on the grounds that it was not art. In this essay, then, I will use art always to mean Fine Art - that is to say that post enlightenment European concept of an autonomous realm of production and reception to which we still adhere, and not to the more utilitarian understandings of art as varieties of techne which preceded it. had no real equivalent of our Fine Art.' (Kemp, Behind the Picture, 1997).' And so on. Preface to Plato, 1963) 'The Renaissance. Perfect Sound Forever: THOUGHTS ON MUSIC AND THE AVANT GARDE- notesġ Until at least the end of the seventeenth century painting and sculpture were classified as mechanical, not liberal, arts '.neither art nor artist, as we use the words, is translatable into archaic or high classical Greek.' (Havelock.
0 kommentar(er)
