Aesthetic Empiricism and the Challenge of Fakes and Ready Mades Gordon Graham

Graham, G. (2005) Aesthetic Empiricism and the Challenge of Fakes and Ready Mades, 

Gordon Graham. In Kieran, M. (2005) 

Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Oxford, Blackwell.

Aesthetic Empiricism. Are the merits of an artwork within itself, and not based upon facts external to it, or is it essential to consider the context of work.

I did find this text interesting and a useful debate of the issues, but I also found it a little full of aside suppositions which I found distracting.

My own ideas about the ready made in art is one which I have never yet seen argued - I think that as well as all the usual reasons, it is the artist's eye which recognises a thing as art, which has always been there, but has never been framed as art. If I present the sky as art, or a cloudscape, that is ready made art, but it may take an artist of a future generation to declare it so in a Duchampian way - audacious!

If ready-mades rely upon extrinsic context, and fakes are defined by that, the argument continues at the extremities of the debate, that artworks are items of connoisseurship, subject to a subjective aesthetic scale. In my mind, the public, artists and galleries can indeed have it all ways - although the positions seem paradoxical and one might disprove the other, I think both views clearly can exists together, and in the same mind. One does not preclude the other, as art appreciation, critique and understanding are overlapping issues combining knowledge, opinion and preferences.

Reflection

This is one of those texts which I have had to reread several times to really get. It's layered with ideas, and sends me off in other directions of thought towards other books I remember and things people have said over the years. However, I just can't get past the early assumption about Duchamp's intentions in submitting the urinal Fountain to the exhibition in 1917. The author follows a series of suppositions and guesses which may well be true, or have elements of the truth, and yet presents his version as the probable inadvertent joke which turned out to change art history.

It may be rather an irrelevant point I am distracted by, but I have now read more about that exhibition, and Duchamp's intentions. In fact, the idea to submit the urinal cannot be so easily interpreted. Duchamp himself credited the idea to an unknown female friend who had sent him a urinal. The urinal itself likely parodied a contemporary trend in American Art, which championed industrial machinery. If the ready made in an art exhibition matters at all, then so does the intention of presenting it - a joke, a parody, an exercise in pedantry, a borrowed, passed on idea, or a deliberate and knowing act. Perhaps the result is all the same as it has reverberated through the decades,

16th July 2013