As usual, when it comes to toilets, the media missed the story.
The press is all aflutter over last week's poll of 500 art-world bigwigs naming Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain as the most influential work of modern art of the 20th Century. While a few thoughtful articles sprung up here and there, the majority fell mainly into two equally objectionable categories: flippant lighter-side-of-the-news filler, and scorn from vitriolic editorialists making excessive use of phrases like "those ivory tower eggheads." What about Picasso? say these indignant critics-for-a-day, reveling in their role as self-appointed Cultural Ambassador for the NASCAR Dad. What about Matisse? they add, secretly proud they know the name of more than one modern artist. They, at least, painted. They, at least, had talent. All Duchamp did was stick a urinal on a pedestal. This just goes to show, these writers triumphantly conclude, that modern art is a bunch of crap.
And then they proudly admire their clever pun.
When toilets hit the news, you know you can expect a barrage of softball reporting in the larger and more respectable media outlets,
When I saw Fountain in London, I was very moved. (I'm allowed to make puns like that.)
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anti-book learnin' indignance from the columnists and small-market editorial writers, and overused poop puns from both. We saw it during the
Troy Musil debacle. We saw it on
World Toilet Day. And now we're seeing it about
Fountain. When the news involves toilets, the media doesn't look beyond the bowl.
It's not that I think toilets aren't funny. It's just that the New York Times isn't supposed to be funny. The Wall Street Journal isn't supposed to be funny. The A.P. isn't supposed to be funny. Why do toilets give serious editors license to abandon the dignity and respect they afford every other subject? Why do toilets make it acceptable for otherwise-staid media organizations to run headlines like "Modern Art Is All Wet" when they'd never run, say, "Drowning Victim Is All Wet"?
In the latest case, this media bias has cheapened one of art's most important works.
Much uninformed criticism of modern art boils down to complaining that the artists aren't talented -- any five-year-old could splatter paint on a canvas, archetypical knee-jerk editorialist Stanley P. Gershbein of the Park Slope Courier (Brooklyn) might say, and any five-year-old could stick a toilet on a table and call it art. Modern art is a joke because none of those so-called artists (knee-jerk editorialists love the phrase "so-called") even know how to hold a brush.
That's exactly why Fountain is so spectacular: because Duchamp was a painting virtuoso. I give you Nude Descending a Staircase, one of Cubism's most
Nude Descending A Staircase, 1912.
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spectacular works. Duchamp possessed incredible artistic talent, which is why Fountain is makes such a powerful statement -- he made a conscious decision to call something art that required exactly none of his aesthetic ability. All he did was give a toilet to a gallery. So when you're in the gallery, looking at the toilet, you're forced to think: "Why is this art? Because the artist said so? Because the museum said so? Is this still art if it's in a bathroom? Is Duchamp the artist, or is Kohler? What about all these other pieces of art -- why are they art? What is art? What ISN'T art?"
These are the very questions that drive modern art today.
Wim Delvoye's Cloaca raises these questions. So does Dan Wood's The Longest Urinal. So does Piero Manzoni's Merde d'Artiste. And so do the works of Warhol and Pollock and Mondrian. Looking at any of these, in which the aesthetic effort of the artist was clearly tempered by some sort of intellectual or conceptual intent, you are forced to ask yourself the same questions Fountain first posed in 1917.
Back in the bygone day for which all these reactionary columnists seem to yearn, art was about aesthetics. Depiction. A painting of war looked like war, and signified how bad war was. A picture of a French nobleman looked like a French nobleman, and signified how noble this Frenchman was. Nowadays, though, when you see art that looks like something, you have to wonder -- what did the artist mean by depicting something recognizable? What caused the artist to reject the convention of rejecting convention?
This is why Fountain is so important.
But the media doesn't really cover that.
The media didn't really cover how Troy Musil lost his job and his freedom, or how his case typified a nation so paranoid that we call the FBI, the CIA, the police, the fire department, the bomb squad and the evening news first, and ask questions later. The media didn't really cover the issues raised by World Toilet Day --the abhorrent sanitary conditions of the world's poor on the one hand, or the ecological damage that flush toilets invariably brings on the other. And it didn't really cover the significance of Fountain. Instead, the media just focused on toilets. Toilets make it funny.
We at PoopReport agree with them, of course. Toilets make it funny. But we look beyond the funny, to the very serious issues that lurk past the humor. And it really bothers me that we seem to be one of the only media outlets that do so. Just like the Daily Show shouldn't be the only news show thinking critically about the government, PoopReport shouldn't be the only media outlet thinking critically about poop.
The irony of all the Fountain coverage, of course, is that Fountain makes a pretty strong argument that modern art IS crap. What's annoying is that there are many other equally important interpretations of Fountain -- but this is the only one on which the media focuses.
