Art is a thing of the past
The relationship between time, art and technology
🏷️ Categories: History, Art, Creativity
In 1917, the Society of Independent Artists in the United States received a strange sculpture.
The Society was planning to hold the largest modern art exhibition ever organized in the country at the Grand Central Palace of Art in Manhattan, so they received numerous proposals from all kinds of artists. Among them was this strange sculpture by someone called R. Mutt, entitled “Fountain” and accompanied by the following message: “Everyday objects can be elevated to the dignity of works of art by the artist’s decision” (Martin, 1999).
This was the sculpture they received.
The proposal was immediately ignored and was not exhibited at the Grand Central Palace, but an intriguing question remained unresolved: who was R. Mutt and what did he intend with his extravagant work of art? If it can be called “art”.
No one understood him and controversy soon arose.
A group of artists who supported the proposal of the mysterious person expressed the following: “He took an ordinary article, placed it so that its usefulness disappeared under a new title and point of view - he created a new thought for that object” (Blindman, 1917).
Time passed and the author revealed his identity.
R. Mutt was the French artist Marcel Duchamp, and his controversial work is now considered one of the most influential in modern art, creating its own artistic genre, conceptual art (Cabinet, 2007).
Look at one crucial detail, this is the only sentence I have highlighted from the story: “he placed it so that its usefulness disappeared under a new title and point of view.”
Why do you think that idea is so important?
This phenomenon of turning into art something that was not originally conceived as art is common, much more common than you think. It is the theory of the technical obsolescence of art.
You will see.
Art and the passage of time
The philosopher Hegel said that art is a thing of the past (Hegel, 1977).
As societies change, so do their concepts of beauty. Many objects that originally had a clear function eventually lose their usefulness and become mere decorative objects. If you think Duchamp's urinal is odd, check this out:
The building you see on the right is the Segovia aqueduct in Spain. It was built by the Roman Empire and is nothing more than a pipe from the 2nd century AD whose sole purpose was to carry water from point A to point B.
Now it is an architectural wonder and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
This change in perception is happening because technology is advancing and we have better technology to transport water, so we remember this building as a symbol of the past. In the present it would be easy and cheap to make an aqueduct like this, but it does not have the historical value of having been built almost 2000 years ago.
That is the big difference, the past cannot be reconstructed.
Who cares that its function was only to transport water?
What matters is that it was built in the 2nd century AD.
Art begins when technology advances
The aqueduct is one of many cases, and don't think that it only happens with buildings.
In the 20th century, forms of entertainment that were not considered art became highly valuable objects due to technological advances.
During the 19th century, the novel was not considered a high art form, it was something to entertain the general public; in fact, most critics were critics of poetry. However, as cinema began to become more widespread, the novel began to be valued. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote what are considered masterpieces just when the general public was moving towards the cinema (Penguin Random House).
I go further.
During the first decades of Hollywood, filmmakers did not consider themselves artists, but mere workers of entertainment. However, with the emergence of the auteur theory in the 60s and 70s, promoted by critics such as Truffaut and Godard, the film director came to be seen as the author of an art, as happened to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles (Astruc, 1948).
Want more?
Television was seen as a low-quality medium compared to cinema or literature, but with the arrival of the internet, series have been revalued. The Wire, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones have made the popularity of series explode through Netflix or HBO and are rising as an art that competes with cinema.
Will YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Twitch streams or Twitter threads ever end up in a museum? Or, even more disturbingly, will my letters be there?
For now, none of this is art, but tomorrow we'll see.
✍️ Your turn: What elements of the present that are not considered art do you think will one day become art? My bet is on video games.
💭 Quote of the day: “I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two important epochs in the history of the world. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for the art world.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
See you very soon! 👋
References 📚
Astruc. (1948). El nacimiento de una vanguardia: La Caméra stylo. https://umh3593.umh.es/enlaces/bibliografia/manifiestos-del-cine/el-nacimiento-de-una-vanguardia-la-camera-stylo-alexander-astruc-1948/
Blindman No. 2. (1917). http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/blindman/2/05.htm
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Lecciones de estética: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. https://ddooss.org/libros/HEGEL.pdf
Cabinet. (2007). An Overview of the Seventeen Known Versions of “Fountain” | Cabinet. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/duchamp.php
Martin, T. (1999). Essential surrealists.
Penguin Random House. Modern Library Top 100. [Link].
True about how the advancement of technology changes our attitudes towards everyday objects. That aqueduct, for example, now rests on its laurels of displaying the genius of the Romans to develop that structure in the first place. It hadn't been done before, at least not in Europe. But people's lives were improved when water could be delivered as never before by this monumental architecture. Some people today look at that marvel of Roman ingenuity and ask, "how did they do that with their primitive tools and knowledge?" Apparently, they weren't so primitive nor were their tools. But the tools and technology we've developed today make building huge structures or machines so "easy," that the stonework of this aqueduct mystifies the imagination.
Wonderful column, I used to teach a class where we spend a few days wondering what was art. We looked at work such as Mutt's but also more controversial work like that of Serrano who uses blood, piss, and such to work. His art is featured in one of Metallica's albums too -- it looks like fire but it is not.
A while ago we wrote a column thinking about what historians do. In some ways we suggested they are forgers who make forgeries of the past. https://curingcrime.substack.com/p/did-history-happen-54461589e02b?r=2bk4r1