What is Art? - Southwestern Law School

WHAT IS ART? 127calling expert witnesses to convey one key message for the jury: forgoodness’ sake, this is art on trial, not mass murder. 71 An array of eminentart experts gave evidence for the defence. They offered the juryearnest, erudite, entertaining, and illuminating discourses about thehistorical lineage of art as currency, bartering traditions, the economicvalue of art, the art marketplace, Dada, 72 appropriation of found objectsby artists, 73 Conceptualism, 74 Performance Art, 75 Trompe-l’oeil, 76and Pop Art. 7771. The nature and flavour of the defence’s appeal to the jury are captured in thefollowing extracts from defence counsel’s opening address: “The Mona Lisa is not a reproductionofanItalianwoman,andVanGoghdidnotreproducesunflowers...Boggsis not an artist of that calibre—and being an artist would in any case be no defencein itself—but if you just look at his drawings you will see that they are not reproductions. . . but an artist’s impression, objects of contemplation . . . they had never beenpassed off as real currency . . . and not even a moron in a hurry would mistake thesedrawings for the real thing, they are obviously drawings . . . Boggs is no mere reproducer,he’s an artist. You may or may not like what he does. You may find what hedoes of value. You may feel that a Boggs isn’t worth the paper it’s drawn on . . . butthat’s not the point. The point is that these are original works of art and not reproductionsat all.”72. “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point forperformance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration ofanti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movementthat lay the foundation for Surrealism.” See FRANCIS PICABIA (TRANS. MARC LOW-ENTHAL), I AM ABEAUTIFUL MONSTER: POETRY, PROSE, AND PROVOCATION (2007).73. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) used found objects and exhibited them as hisown artworks from around 1915. He called them Readymades. He challenged traditionalnotions of what art could be, and especially the idea of art being of aestheticor ‘retinal’ value: “My idea was to choose an object that wouldn’t attract me, eitherby its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it,you see.” (Interview, BBC TV, 1966.) Duchamp is widely accepted as the most influentialartist of the 20th Century, being the progenitor of Conceptual Art. See http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/duch/hd_duch.htm.74. Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) was a progenitor of Conceptual Art in the UnitedStates in the 1960s: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspectof the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planningand decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. Theidea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Quoted from LeWitt’s article Paragraphson Conceptual Art, ARTFORUM, June 1967.75. Performance Art emerged in the 1950s, and especially the 1960s and 1970s, vianotable visual artists such as Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Yves Klein, Yoko Ono,Barbara T Smith, and Carolee Schneemann. Sometimes called “live art”, it eludes precisedefinition, embracing unscripted or unchoreographed events presented with orwithout audience involvement, not necessarily in an art gallery, lasting for any lengthof time. Marina Abramović (1946–) is the most widely known performance artist currentlyperforming around the world.76. The ancient technique of “perspectival illusionism” (optical illusion) has beenemployed by artists since time immemorial.77. Pop Art developed in the UK and the U.S. in the 1950s, challenging conventionby appropriating mass-produced visual images and icons of popular culture from advertisements,comic books, product and packaging designs, television, and film; oftenusing industrial processes to make “multiple originals” such as photo-silkscreenprinting.