> I don't know if Fountain is or isn't art.

That's the entire point. The fact is so many people discuss this one thing from 1917- it provokes a good discussion on what is and isn't art. I don't see how this is viewed as snobbish. There is no reason one is obligated to make "traditional" art.

> and didn't because I didn't think it's the kind of art I want to make or celebrate

Celebrate isn't really the right term here. It's an art piece that's displayed at a museum. The discussion around it is noted as important.

> still think "Fountain" is worthless as art

"Fountain" is not only art, but it has immense value as comme. Art shouldn't be looked at in terms of "worth". It comes down to human expression, which in turn has a specific context. Art doesn't exist in a social vacuum. Just because it isn't prototypical "beautiful" art doesn't mean it's not worth anything at all.

"Celebrate", "worth", etc, I'm probably not conveying the right meaning. English is not my first language, but even if it was, it's hard to put this into written words.

I think considering Fountain snobbish is my right. I don't think something that fosters discussion is valuable for that alone. Not in all cases anyway. I don't consider all art valuable (not in the sense of money, in case I'm unclear). I rebel against the notion I must acknowledge all forms of art as valuable. I don't and I won't. I've no wish to impose my will on others, of course.

I understand art doesn't mean beauty and beauty doesn't mean art. I'm not artistically naive; in fact I consider myself artistic in the sense I can both create and appreciate art.

After all these words, I still consider Fountain "something that happened and that people acknowledge and discuss", but not good art (good in the sense "it has artistic merit", not in the sense of pretty). That's not good enough for me.

Here's how I look at it: "Fountain" is art, but miscategorized as sculpture instead of performance art.

I don’t want to wade too deep into these waters, because I will admit that I am not prepared to properly navigate them myself - but I think it’s a common misconception that art is “supposed” to be good, or have a certain quality about it.

Not all art should inspire wonder. Not all art should be of any kind of quality. I am not a big fan of that piece, myself; but one wonders if perhaps, the very intent of creating that piece was to evoke those kinds of feelings, that kind of reaction?

I listen to a fair amount of noise music. Not all of it is even very listenable. A lot of it evokes feelings of dread, discomfort, pain, anxiety. Of course it sounds terrible - that’s the point. It’s a vehicle for emotional catharsis. It’s a thing that makes you feel something, even if they aren’t feelings that most people enjoy. Even if wanting to experience those feelings is not something that most people could relate to.

Just a perspective. I agree with you, that we should be able to speak freely about art, and that it has nothing to do with how you should be perceived as a person if you do not consider certain pieces to have any sort of artistic merit.

>you can still, after all of this, conclude that the piece of art is snobbish, artless garbage.

>I "know" it's worthless to me.

So long as one understands the "to me" is implicit, and so long as one understands that POV to be one of countless POV's, I don't see any issue with criticism.

For myself, if something doesn't work, and I see that it's not the work of a novice, I tend to default to, "It's not for me right now," rather than, "It's garbage." I can still discuss the reasons it doesn't work, but I find this perspective to be more helpful. It makes me more curious about the opinions of people who like it, which gives me more access to more perspectives. When something doesn't work for me, I want to know why it works for others. I don't mean this to come off as a game of semantics.

Yes, of course, it's always "to me". I don't wish to stop other people from liking it, or set fire to the museum that displays it. I wish we didn't have to be this careful about language.

Note I will, however, make a mental judgment of someone who finds "Fountain" very moving or noteworthy. Again, this is my personal judgment and I think I'm entitled to it.

edit:

> "It's not for me right now"

This has definitely happened to me, but with books and movies.

>I wish we didn't have to be this careful about language.

I didn't mean to say you do. I was talking about perspective, because it impacts how we experience things and can help or undermine our ability to enjoy and understand.

>This has definitely happened to me, but with books and movies.

Same - also happens a lot with music.

Your post is saying something roughly parallel to what I've been saying in my other, rather less tolerant posts. It's a good description.

The Fountain is just one in a series of Duchamp's 'readymades' which are found objects that became works of art when the artist identified them as such. Duchamp was not doing this to be a snob but rather to draw people's attention to appreciation of the design of everyday things.

Yes, I'm familiar with Duchamp's work and still don't like it :)

Sometimes snobbery finds you even when you don't seek it. This can apply to the spectators of Duchamp's work even more than to Duchamp himself!

I agree, and did not mean to imply judgement against anyone who dislikes "Fountain" and other, similar pieces of art.

I don't even know how I truly feel about "Fountain" either; all I know is that it is quite thought provoking for me and has taught me a lot about how I think about and digest the world. To me, even if the art is ugly and snobbish, it still has merit if it helps us better explore our world. The art piece's mere existence allows us to have this conversation about the relative merits of different forms of art, which I believe to be meritorious in and of itself.

I think this has led us to an interesting, if for now rhetorical question: what is art for? Well, at least I'll have something to think about for the rest of the day :)

Thanks for taking this the right way :) It's definitely a conversation worth having. There are plenty of things I consider art that other people despise.

I’ve been considering Shia LaBeouf’s definition, in response to the question “Are memes art?” on Hot Ones. Art is anything that moves you.

> I dislike it or consider it snobbish and not worth my time (or even "not art").

Sounds like you had a reaction to the piece or at least the performance art of signing it off as art.

Literally anything can move you, so by that definition everything is art. If everything is art the term loses all meaning.

Last year, I went to a hacker event held in an art space - various things owned by the space were labeled "this is art, don't hack it". However, as the event want on, hastily-printed copies of the same signs appeared on more things - a vending machine, someone's laptop, a staircase, someone's sleeping bag on a balcony. It gave me the opportunity to see these things in a new light - in my opinion, there was art there both in simply labeling these things as art, and in the items that had been labeled as art.

So, what is art? Is it restricted to the common categories - a painting, a poem, a sculpture, a cliche 5 minute film played in a loop on a wall of a gallery? Can new categories of art be created? Are there one-off things that are art, while similar things would not be? What's the criteria? Does it have to be technically brilliant, or intentionally created as art? If I see something as art, but the creator made it by accident or for a practical purpose, who is right? What if we can't ask the creator why they made it? "I know it when I see it" might be the only criteria, but that obviously implies that others might see differently.

And finally: does it matter? If the word "art" has indeed lost all meaning, does that change the way we interact with the world, or communicate with each other? How often does the average person communicate about "art" in a general sense, rather than simply what they enjoy, anyway?

> does it matter? If the word "art" has indeed lost all meaning, does that change the way we interact with the world, or communicate with each other?

It does for me. If "art" and "everything" become synonyms, I feel I've lost a valuable concept, and one I definitely use frequently.

Your anecdote about the "don't hack this" label is indeed clever and funny, and it's making a statement I can relate to. It's like hacking the event, in a way.

I don't see that anyone so far has argued that only a poem, a sculpture or a painting can be art. I'm surprised so many people in this conversation have made a logical connection between "I don't like snobbery like the Fountain/I don't think it's art" and "art must be pretty and only poetry/painting/music are acceptable". Why do people assume it's binary instead of a continuum between art and not-art?

> You're anecdote about the "don't hack this" label is indeed clever and funny, and it's making a statement I can relate to. It's like hacking the event, in a way.

I took away something entirely different from it (I took it as a given that the vending machine was indeed art because someone had proclaimed it to be so, and proceeded to think about what it might have to say within the context of the space and the event), but there you go.

The thing is that simply saying that something is "artless" isn't interesting - someone claimed it is art, and they did it for artistic purpose, and people are thinking about it as if it were art, so why isn't it? There's a big difference between saying that it's a stupid reaction to its context or that it's snobbish, and that it's artless.

I really enjoy witnessing the tagging and graffiti around the railways in the cities I've lived in, and feel there's definitely art in claiming the space in that way, but others feel it's spoiling the view and artless. Which of us is right?

No-one is right about graffiti. I like graffiti too, by the way.

I think I'm as entitled to claiming something is not art as the author who claims it is. For some creations, the consensus will side with one or the other. Nobody can put pigeon feces on display in a museum and force me to think of them as art, no matter what they think.

A lot of people don't consider found objects "real" art, by the way. I'm not alone in this.

That reminds me of a story from 2016 where somebody left a pair of glasses lying on the floor in a gallery and it was interpreted as an exhibit: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/27/pair-of-glas...

Also, the time in 2006 when an artist sent a sculpture to be displayed in a gallery, with a tiny plinth to prop it up: the gallery rejected the sculpture and displayed the plinth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/15/arts.artsnews

Yes, I had a reaction: "this is artless garbage". Whether this reaction transforms the piece into art is up to the reader :)

I'm not saying you don't have a point, but where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line at all? I know I do.

This.

When you see an upside down toilet in a museum and art enthusiasts in awe and say "I could have done that" you express you incomprehension : why is something so trivial admired? I thought I had to do something exceptionnal to get admired. The answer you get is "But you didn't", yeah because I didn't think a toilet had value.

You feel mocked by the artiste. Cheated.

So yeah, creating is hard and it's pretty hard to understand how hard before you tried it yourself but still people should be able to express their total incomprehension of the enthusiastic response de see around them for weird stuff without getting dismissed by a "but you didn't".

Yeah. The debate over Fountain is really a proxy for wider and more important debates about social class, the value of labour etc.

When someone can take a toilet, say it's art, and then it sells for >$10 million, it feels to a lot of people like some parts of society are just deliberately mocking them, rubbing their face in it. They're so rich they can flush $10 million on what looks like trying to grab some brief attention, or be what we now call a social influencer, whilst many other people who work hard every day to develop some truly difficult craft end up with far less or nothing.

Nobody who hates Fountain hates it because it's "not art". They hate it because someone managed to convince a whole lot of rich people to pay them way over the odds for a toilet. It looks and feels like some sort of long con.

This is my main problem with the "but you didn't" objection. I could have made that, in the sense that I am clever and imaginative and creative enough to look at a toilet and say "wouldn't it be funny to take this toilet and put it in a museum and call it art". It's not a high bar. I could not have made that, in the sense that I lack the power to get things into museums, no matter how much artistic merit they have, and the existence of Fountain confirms that this skill is orthogonal to creating things people want to look at.

Damien Hirst takes this mockery you mention and makes it the very focus of his "art". He took a skull and coated it in diamonds and called it "For the love of god". Even the title seems to say "jesus, how far can I push this?"

> I don't know if Fountain is or isn't art. I "know" it's worthless to me.

It's 103 years old and today you are taking the time to discuss it in public. There, at least, is a demonstration that this piece made a dent in the universe.

I'm unconvinced by this line of argumentation, which others have tried before. Age and my attention cannot define art -- are you saying that something that is new or hasn't caught my (very brief) attention is not art? Or let's say it's not about me specifically, but rather about public impact: if something is new and known only by very few people, so that it hasn't really made a big public impact, does this prevent it from being art?

My very standard toilet has caught my attention -- and discourse, dare I say -- way more than Duchamp's urinal. Would most people consider my toilet art? Or would it need to be put on display in a museum?

Can you think of any man-made things older than a century that you wouldn't consider art? I sure can!

I didn't even use the word 'art' let alone propose any of these definitions. I just pointed out that 'Fountain' made an impact on your choices today.

Fair enough. Would you say anything that I single out as worthless is, by the act of giving it my attention, worthy?

I assure you my toilet made an impact in my choices today of far greater import than Duchamp's found object.

"Made a dent in the universe" isn't really a synonym for worthwhile.

Yes, it’s mentioned as a canonical example of not-art masquerading as art in the eyes of many.

I thought this PBS video about "Fountain" and similar pieces of art was very good at describing why they matter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZlrHyzIwcI