Paul Rogers' Weblog

Paul Rogers' Weblog
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e enjte shkurt 24, 2005

The Fountain Redux

My last blog entry was about the greatest piece of art in the 20th Century. Imagine my surprise when I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw one version of Duchamp's "The Fountain." I am out in San Francisco for Sun's Customer Engineering Conference. I hope that some of the technical aspects of the conference will merit comment later. However, before the technical conference a little artistic contemplation at the museum was very nice. I particularly enjoyed the "Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective" exhibit. Photorealism is a very interesting art form. Why would someone carefully recreate a scene that could be captured in a photograph as in the Bechtle image "58 Rambler" on the left?
However, on the issue of Duchamp's "The Fountain," when allowing industrial objects to be exhibited as art, the idea proliferates and objects multiply. Sherry Levine installed a billiard table with 3 balls on it. Robert Gober installed stacks of newspaper tied with twine in one corner of a gallery. Finally Sam Taylor-Wood hung a flat panel monitor with time lapse photography of a rabbit's corpse decomposing called "A Little Death." The questions raised will not be solved in a blog but they are interesting.
(2005-02-24 16:42:13.0) Permalink

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