Four-Eyed Fun

Duchamp’s “urinal” is one piece of art that certainly typifies the Modernist movement in the art world. This piece reflects how a perspective or a definition can change merely because of a label of “art,” or because something normal is turned on its head, turning a urinal into a “fountain,” merely by changing its name. 

Another way of thinking about this is that Duchamp’s “Urinal” only has power as a piece of art, as opposed to a piece of trash, in that it is paid attention to and observed. In the study of physics, there is something called “the observer effect” (often confused with the Heisenberg principal, which doesn’t apply here). In the observer effect, there is a “...disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation.” The act of giving this piece an audience makes it into a work of art. Without the audience to validate and observe it, Duchamp’s work is no longer art. What is significant about this is that his work now only exists as a photograph, underscoring this idea. 

Moreover, it leads to an ideology that exemplifies that one’s own art may be whatever one wishes it to be. There is a question within analyzing art as to whether the meaning of a piece is in the mind of the artist, on the canvas itself, or in the mind of the reader. Modern art typically utilizes a technique in which something is implied, an idea or image, but is not explicit on the canvas.

According to Terry Eagleton’s What Is Literature, literature evolves over time with the audience’s definition and standards as opposed to remaining timeless within the artist’s intent. 

Modern art is like poetry, as opposed to literature; as John Stuart Mill stated, “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard…Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.”