Art in Theory: An Insight from Marcel Duchamp
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Description
An insight from Marcel Duchamp: It’s not what it is or how it’s made that determines whether something is a work of art. The question is, rather, whether we choose to attend to it in a particular way. So it’s a mistake to divide the world into art objects and objects that are not art. Attending to something on a wall as a work of art has rewards, but the object on the wall could have been found, or made, like Duchamp’s urinal, for some other purpose. Artists, novelists, poets—but also curators and critics and theorists—are people who propose things for a certain sort of attention. And what is rewarding in accepting that invitation varies with who we are, what the thing is, when and where we are in place and in time. More than this, the rewards of attending to something—an urn, a poem, a movie, a dance—can change as we change, when we refocus our attention ... or when the world changes ... or when we invent new ways of treating something as an art object. As a result, there’s no single answer to the question of why the arts matter. That’s one of the reasons “art” escapes definition. So no definition, no theory: just three sketches of ways in which art matters.
Source Publication
Are the Arts Essential?
Source Editors/Authors
Alberta Arthurs, Michael F. DiNiscia
Publication Date
2022
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "Art in Theory: An Insight from Marcel Duchamp" (2022). Faculty Chapters. 88.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/88
