iThink
Do you consider yourself an artist?
DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF AN ARTIST? MRS CAREY “One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called philosophy of art: either philosophy or art” Friedrich Schlegel This article attempts to combine a bit of both… I remember vividly a particular assembly at my first teaching post when I was still quite a new to the job. We arrived on a sleepy winter morning to hear a science teacher discuss modern art. The premise of his assembly was that modern art had 'gone too far'. The teacher described how the Tate Gallery had promoted a 1964 replica of Duchamp’s Fountain, which exhibits a standard urinal found in many public toilets, set in the gallery and signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Duchamp had coined the term ‘readymade,’ where an ordinary manufactured object was displayed by the artist as a work of art.
The teacher went on to discuss how years later Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for ‘My Bed’, a messy disarray of objects which was put into a gallery space and captured people’s imagination. The teacher claimed these objects could not be considered beautiful and therefore were ‘not art’. He held modern art in some contempt and declared it was all rubbish. To illustrate his point further, he revealed he was an amateur photographer and displayed some of his own accidental pictures interspersed with other artworks shown in a gallery or sold at a high value. He asked students to guess which were his pictures and which were ‘modern art’ by raising their hand, and in doing so hoped to ridicule some artworks.
04
2022
