ROGER KIMBALL: ‘Art’ and the Pathology of our Age.
And then there was the student at the Ontario College of Art and Design who, in 1996, pushed his own boundaries with an “artwork” that consisted of him vomiting on paintings by others, a Piet Mondrian in New York and a Raoul Dufy at a museum in Ontario.
The truth is that, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing new or “challenging” about the “artists” who populate the trendy precincts of contemporary art. All their “shocking” moves were long ago pioneered by Marcel Duchamp and his fellow Dadaists. Indeed, Marcel Duchamp mapped out both large domains of the pseudo-avant-garde. When Duchamp took objects from everyday life — a bottle rack, a snow shovel—and impishly exhibited them as works of art, he pioneered the entire genre of art-as-banality. When he exhibited a urinal as a sculpture, he twitted the more delicate sensibilities of an earlier age with exactly the same sort of naughty schoolboy outrage that (to take but one example) Tracey Emin’s sordid exhibitionism recycled, lo, these many years later. (Pardon, that’s Dame Tracey Emin to you. Yes, really.)
What our latter-day Dadaists have accomplished is simply the domestication and routinization of the avant-garde. They preserve the gestures but lack the spirit. They pretend to be “challenging” or “transgressing” conventional boundaries, but all such boundaries were long ago erased. Far from guying conventional taste, today’s self-styled avant-garde are today’s conventional taste. The only thing these “artists” challenge is our patience. It is a melancholy, not to say tiresome, spectacle. What it says about our culture is partly depressing, partly anger-inducing. The really breathtaking feature of the thing is that these “artists” actually seem to believe they are brave aesthetic and existential pioneers. It’s contemptible, yes, but also quite sad. Curiously, this is something that Duchamp himself recognized when his impish gestures became celebrated by the art world. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”
Assuming the BBC didn’t go full Michael Moore and staged this scene, you knew the war in Afghanistan was doomed when our betters thought that Duchamp’s style of modernism was something vitally important to teach to young women there: Money Down The Toilet In Afghanistan, that time when progressive US colonialists tried to enlighten Afghans by teaching them about the glories of Dadaist art.
Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan:
https://youtu.be/wdrvpSfJM1w?si=bsn2Ie6tsshKp89c
As original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long until you become garde.”
