The Turtle Two 2oo9
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“The Dada’s sprinkled their broadsides and posters with advertising slogans and reproductions. Picabia’s best work was executed in the cryptodiagram manner of hardware catalogs and engineering texts. Most radically, Duchamp’s Readymades replaced the artist’s labor with a standardized object of ordinary use simply by moving it, largely unchanged, into an art context. Thus the passé but venerable notion of the artist as master illusionist was wryly hinted at, but deadpan, as though it were a slightly vulgar admission among friends. Mass-production techniques, after all, had taken over this role by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, so illusions were more or less lifted from their metropolitan surroundings ready made. They became the artist’s cheap imitations or multiples, but accomplished by none of the illusionistic skills once expected of a professional!" (continues below)



“Harold Rosenberg [The Anxious Object, New York, Horizon, 1964, pp. 61-62] describes how illusionism of this recurrent sort is due in part to urbanization. He writes: The city dweller’s ‘nature’ is a human fabrication - he is surrounded by fields of concrete, forests of posts and wires, etc.; while nature itself, in the form of parks, a snowfall, cats and dogs, is a detail in the stone and steel of his habitat. Given the enormous dissemination of simulated nature through window displays, motion pictures, and TV screens, public and private photography, magazine advertisements, art reproductions, car and bus posters, five-and-ten art, it is plain that in no other period has the visible world been to such an extent both duplicated and anticipated by artifice. Surrounded by artistic copies of presidents, scenes, famous events, we become in the end largely insensitive to the distinction between the natural and the made-up." (continues below)

“Replication, modularity, and serialism, aspects of mass-production, have become the norms of daily life; they are part of the way we think. Only in the fine arts does the quest for originality remain a vestige of individualism and specialization. It is the ideological token of the sufficient self. Yet popular acceptance of psychoanalysis makes everyone today an individual, while the phenomenal growth of leisure time in the economy implies that, potentially, anyone (not just artists, or eccentrics) can pursue a personal life-style. And gradually increasing public and corporate support of pure research, arts education, and the performing arts promises more tangible rewards to the intellectual, than isolation in the garret. These changing social circumstances have at least blunted, if not done away with, the special poignancy that once moved artists to struggle to be idiosyncratic [on the pattern of Greek sunkratikos - ‘mixed together’].” - Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, University of California Press, Berkley, 2003, pp. 141-143