Week 4

To be honest, I don't really understand the works of many of the artists we studied this week. Although they raise interesting questions of creative rights as well as people's varying opinions of what exactly is "art," I prefer to stick to a semi-tradition view of art as beatiful. I say semi-tradition because I have come to appreciate certain styles in modern art (mostly as a result of my courses here at Centenary). I'm not completely stuck in the Stone Ages! With that being said, the areas I do not understand or for that matter necessarily appreciate are those explored by artists such as Sherrie Levine and Marcel Duchamp. Sherrie Levine takes photos of other peoples photos, paintings, and sculptures. How is that artistic? She didn't do anything creative herself. She simply took a photogrpahy of someone else's good work and creativitly and put her name on it. She certainly accomplishes her point of ownership issues, but past that I am pressed to find significant meaning in her works. Similarly, Marcel Duchamp is most famous for his work "Fountain." The is a very obvious part of the Dada (anti-art) movement of the early 1900s because rather than producing a replica of a beatiful object or scene or creatively making a sculpture or painting, Duchamp takes a urinal, slaps his name on it, and calls it [found] art! Why didn't I think of that, I could be making millions by taking just about anything thing, calling it art, and asking big bucks for it. How can some people get away with such an absurd thing, but others can't?

To be fair to the tradition of appropriation, there was one artist that enjoyed. I found that work of Michael Ray Charles interesting. Altough he along with the previously mentioned artists are famous for taking things that already exist and sometime manipulating them, then making them their own, the way in which he does this sits much better with me. He does do creative work of his own and I find his end product much more interesting.