…but thank you for calling me bitch

Do not tell me:

I wish to be a baker in Algeria

In order to sing with the revolutionaries

Do not tell me:

I wish to be a shepherd in the Yemen

To sing for the uprising of the age

Do not tell me:

I wish to be a waiter in Havana

To sing for the victory of the poor

Do not tell me:

I wish to be a stone carrier in Aswan

To sing for the rocks

My friends:

The Nile will not pour into the Volga

The Congo and Jordan Rivers

Will not serve the Euphrates

Each river has its own

Our land is not barren

Each land has its own rebirth

by Jim Harrison

Material Shapes

Aside from Duchamp’s readymades, I love “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even”. Pictured below, the work invokes a complex machine, one my professor spent a great deal of time studying. Eventually, he reached his conclusion. My professor had been pranked. He believes “Bride Stripped Bare” is a joke about masturbation, hidden to all except those study it excessively.

As a lover of art, there are many complex and technically impressive works being created today, which both embrace different artistic traditions and break from them. To ignore those is to ignore contemporary art.

Here, OP is raging against conceptual art, which stimulates thought and challenges tradition. He wants his followers to believe that art has “degenerated”, because the West has “degenerated”. OP is intentionally engaging with fascist ideas of “degenerate art”.

If OP wanted to be accurate, he would seek to restore the Salon System, the Beaux Arts Academy, and classical training in the arts. The collapse of this specific system allowed for Modernism to evolve. Of course, that’s not what OP is talking about. He’s evoking beauty as a moral standard, telling his followers to “restore Western tradition”, to fight against aesthetic “degeneracy” in culture.

(By the way, Duchamp is commenting ON MODERNISM with “Fountain”. Duchamp submitted the work to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, who would accept any work by any artist, for a small fee. In part, Duchamp is saying, “Is this what you Modernists want? A urinal? Look me in the eyes and prove this is not art.”

Duchamp had other readymades, like his snow shovel, where if you actually look at the photos, the handle is square and the bowl is way too flimsy. Why would manufacturers make a snow shovel with a squared-off handle? It’s impossible to hold! Duchamp slapped the “readymades” label on all these items and the hoity-toity art people who were so good at looking at things didn’t see it (probably because they’d never had to do labor like shovel snow imo, amongst other things).

And they’re different! If it was a real “readymade” he could have just bought some more at his local hardware store, but no. He changed them in OBVIOUS WAYS.

See the triangle of holes?

Here’s the one from the Tate Modern:

Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here.

SFMOMA’s edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version.

Here’s one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!

Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. It’s a “readymade” but it’s not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation.

It’s not even clear if he made it! He wrote a letter to his sister claiming that a female friend sent it to him, and he just enrolled it in the art exhibit under his own name. There’s also a possibility that that female friend was himself, since he later had a female pseudonym of Rrose Sélav.

Respire

Part of my Ashes collection

1. Mount Fuji from a plane window.

2. Arc de Triomphe, Paris

3. Aerial view of Kaaba, Mecca

4. A view of the Taj Mahal that you do not usually see, highlighting the stark contrast between opulence and poverty divided by a single wall.

5. Top down view of the Statue of Liberty

6. The backside of Tutankhamun's burial mask

7. The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica seen through Rome's most famous keyhole.

8. The worn steps of the Tower of Pisa

9. Photographer Alexander Ladanivskyy, in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, captured an extraordinary drone shot of the Great Pyramid of Giza from an unusual perspective.

10. The Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall of China meets the ocean.

Jean-François Millet - Bird's-Nesters (1874)