Art fighting its way back to aesthetics: Revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain

When Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi claim that ‘art is not what you think it is,’ aesthetics itself is implicitly challenged, especially aesthetics’ seemingly inherent correlation with art. However, aesthetics, as complex and ambiguous as the concept of art, calls for a similar suspicion. In this...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Anne Sejten
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2016-12-01
Series:Journal of Art Historiography
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/sejten.pdf
Description
Summary:When Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi claim that ‘art is not what you think it is,’ aesthetics itself is implicitly challenged, especially aesthetics’ seemingly inherent correlation with art. However, aesthetics, as complex and ambiguous as the concept of art, calls for a similar suspicion. In this essay, ‘Aesthetics is not what you think it is’ is thus an invitation to break through at the very point in which contemporary art seems to state the opposite—that art no longer should be a concern of aesthetics. The iconic example of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, Fountain, which writes art history at the threshold of contemporary art, is summoned, on the contrary, to give evidence of an intact, though profoundly transformed, aesthetic engagement by the artist.
ISSN:2042-4752