Fountain

Iconoclasts everywhere can express their disapproval with the comfort of knowing they have a shot at notoriety on Art Crimes, a website dedicated to “acts within the confines of a museum or gallery space where a work is willfully damaged.”

The acts of vandalism are, for the most part, quite boring. Far from dramatic displays righteous anger, the perpetrators distribute rambling, incoherent manifestos and exhibit delusions of grandeur while making weak or reactionary political statements. In reality, these stunts hardly deserve the glancing attention they receive.

For example, two artist-slash-activists peeing on Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is such an obvious performance that it’s barely worth noting. It’s not even original, at least if you believe the following possibly apocryphal story.

A trustee of a major museum, I’ve been told, was asked to help purchase one of the eight reproductions of Fountain authorized in 1964. He graciously donated a respectable sum for the work, despite personal misgivings about its artistic importance—a urinal, after all, can be picked up for a comparative bargain at any American Standard factory.

After the champagne gala for the opening of a show of recent acquisitions, the trustee couldn’t be bothered to find the lavatory, and decided to use a more convenient facility. After all, if he couldn’t appreciate the Fountain as sculpture, he might as well put his purchase to a more functional use.

I, Synesthesia

Entirely subjectively and anecdotally and unfalsifiably, I suspect that my sensory perception is intensifying. Smells linger longer, tastes blossom louder, sounds resonate larger. When the sommelier says, “and a hint of chocolate,” I can taste the previously imperceptible tart smoothness of cocoa. I get lost in the smooth rolling plains that break against the salty spires in a bite of parmesan. Occasionally on the subway or among the sidewalk crowds I catch a whiff of the same particular cologne that smells vaguely of cedar; it’s an out-of-place, spongy-pourous scent among wafts of bitter metal and hot concrete. Sadly, colors remain as they always were.

John Cage. 10 Stones.

This inevitably leads me to wonder about the visual language of sound. What would it look like to feed a strain of Bach into a Jacquard loom? What color is the Aria from the Goldberg Variations? What if the score, instead of constraining music to quanta of time and pitch, could show curves and nuance and aura?

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Donald Judd, or Cheap Furniture?

Take the quiz and beat my perfect score, bitches!

I Bought Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol. Self portrait. 1966.

I read about Andy Warhol’s diaries in an article by Louis Menand in the New Yorker a few months back, but it wasn’t until I was browsing at the Strand today that I ran across the book. It’s strikingly candid and voyeuristic, and for some reason I just can’t put it down.

As an aside, I find that I’m drawn to artists’ writings more than their actual work these days. I’m not sure if it’s a subconscious reaction to the (supposedly) jittery art market or if I’m just in a more literary than visual phase. Whatever the case, Donald Judd’s writings are next on my list.