Duchamp

I'll come out at say it: I don't like Duchamp. Never have, probably never will. His "Nude Descending a Staircase" was great, new, and really a great study of motion with modernism (which I'm not a huge fan of in the first place). A shovel as art? C'mon. I think I should just draw a dot on a piece of paper and try to see which gallery would support my "minimalist" art. I could come up with some kind of explanation of why it's great. But that doesn't make it art.

I don't like the Bride piece, and I don't think it should have this great acclaim. It's not that great. Yes, it's a fresh idea with the notes etc, and yes I can understand the movement and mechanics this is supposed to represent between the bride and bachelors and all the gases and machines. I can even accept that the "bride runs on love gasoline (a secretion of the bride's sexual glands)" because sex and the attraction between men and women really is a chemical thing. It's great that he uses that and expresses it through the mechanics (which wasn't his main focus, but thought he put into it). But I don't like it, and I don't think it's a great achievement.

It's not visual pleasing. In fact, there's nothing really visual about it. Like the article said, Duchamp "defines art primarily as a mental act rather than a visual one." Art should evoke emotion and thought and be very much mental, but visual components is a HUGE part of art and should be what brings around the mental part. This is not "Mental Concepts" this is "Visual Concepts." Art is (as in Duchamp's genre of art) is visual. Music can be art as well as many other things. But art is mostly visual. Monet's lilypads and gardens don't evoke some mental thought from me, or make people painstakingly flip through notes to understand it, it's visual pleasing. Art = visual. That's the problem I have with Duchamp. He tries to be too philosophical. He takes something no one would consider art and calls it art, and because he stands by it and can explain it, people think it's amazing. Well, that seems like a con artist to me.

People can dedicate their whole lives trying to determine the line between art and real life. All I know, is that may be "art", but its not good art. Not by the definitions and terms I grew up with.