Monkeys' Right To Paint

I've started looking into "new" material that can feed into our project.

One way to go forward is to go backwards. So I want to take the next few days to look at some historical contexts for found objects in art. There's plenty of literature about this, of course. I don't want to be too discriminate at this stage, so I've selected some books to start my archaeological dig.

The first is by Turkish artist Bedri Baykam. It's called Monkeys' Right to Paint and the Post-Duchamp Crisis. I deliberately avoided going to the obvious academic publications by art historians published in the UK or USA. Still I'm surprised to see that some things are still inevitable. From Duchamp we must get to Fluxus through Dada, collage, Warhol, and Beuys, among others.

The idea of ready-mades is entrenched in happenings.

Baykam points out that there are five generations of ready-made-makers. Are we the sixth (or seventh) generation? And who belongs to which generation?

Do I believe that art is dead? Is it useful to think this way at all?

I particularly like this quotation attributed to Salvador Dali: "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."

Here's Baykam: "The text is the major weapon that keeps the Western capitalist art market from collapsing. Had the text not existed, the financial crisis of the contemporary art scene would have been much more dramatic."

Kunst = Kapital.

FOUND OBJECT TS0001 [audio]:
"JA JA JA JA JA, NEE NEE NEE NEE NEE" - Joseph Beuys (1968)

FOUND OBJECT TS0002 [audio]:
In Memoriam George Maciunas - Nam June Paik + Beuys (1978)