Yes, but is it art?

I was watching the latest video in my course "Understanding and Appreciating Great Art" tonight and we got on to the subject of Dadaism and found objects. This, for me, was fascinating because it goes right to the heart of the question of what constitutes art. If you go way way back, like thirty thousand years to the Chavet cave paintings you ask yourself what utility or need drove our ancestors to create images of the animals they encountered and hunted. Once civilisation got started, for centuries art was little more than propaganda and artists were basically paid to reinforce the prevailing hierarchy in society - glorifying religious, political or royal figures. It was not until comparatively recently that we got back to the cave and started portraying the lives of ordinary people and objects, and later still before artists became genuinely radical and threatening. 

So when Marcel Duchamp upended a urinal and signed it in the name of Dadaism was he making a genuine artistic statement or just 'avin a larf? Does sticking a bicycle wheel in a stool or hanging a bottle rack from a ceiling (which he also did) actually mean anything?

We have a friend who works for a company that makes stuff for Damien Hirst. He gives them his ideas and they do it. They also do shop window displays for West End stores. Wood, glue, plastic, canvas, whatever. The act of commission is the same. Is one art and the other not? Both are aimed at a commercial result.

The artists of the High Renaissance were breathtakingly gifted. Duchamp and Hirst couldn't do that and wouldn't claim to want to. But is having technical ability and using it in the service of the Pope a moral and artistic achievement? Duchamp suggested that being a good painter was no more than being a clever a monkey - it didn't mean you had asked or answered a profound question.

It was all Freud's fault of course; he said that we needed to liberate the subconscious and art embraced the idea that you could do that in ways that were unlike anything that had gone before. Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism ... Art became a chaotic democracy in which things were what we claimed for them. 

So here is my little artistic experiment. My blip is the image I have chosen to present. The two extras are my own interpretation or notes, and finally the original photograph from which it was cropped and processed. Is it art? Well it works for me in that it made me think and gave me pleasure ... Have a good look before you look at the extras and draw your own conclusions (no pun intended but .... well ... you could give it a go) ...

LOOKING BACK

Curiously this date seems to have artistic connotations in all my previous blips.

Five years ago - dead dogs
Four years ago - TS Eliot
Three years ago - the art of dance
Two years ago - the art of the doughnut
One year ago - the man who mistook his wife for a hat