Were art gallery visitors who mistook sunglasses and a watch placed on the floor by a witty teenager victims of a joke on modern art? Or was the culprit the real joke?
It is not the first time conceptual art has caused the kind of confusion that in some eyes mocks its pretensions. The misunderstandings tend to take the inverse form of cleaners mistaking artworks for trash and clearing them away. This time, a Twitter user Jack Dudeham put his own possessions into the frame then photographed people mistaking them for art.
The weakness of his joke is that it laughs at such a vast range of good art that instead of a clever satire on art’s dafter claims, it becomes a moronic act of philistinism. Sorry, but if you find the idea of ordinary objects becoming art inherently absurd, you are not just laughing at a bunch of overpaid contemporary artists. You are sneering at Picasso, who made a bull’s head out of bicycle parts; or Robert Rauschenberg, who thrust a stuffed goat through a tyre (and yes, he was making a sexual reference); at Jasper Johns, who made bronze replicas of beer cans. The idea that ordinary stuff can become art is as old as cubism. In 1912, Picasso was already sticking bits of newspaper on to his paintings. Does that make people who admire cubist paintings idiots?
i set down my watch and sunglasses in #an abstract exhibit at the DMA pic.twitter.com/D8v6mJHNl0
— The Jack (@jackdudeham) April 4, 2015
This prank is such a crass comment that it rebounds on the prankster. It is like a joke about the modern art world from some gleefully idiotic 1980s comedy in which beer-fuelled students also vomit on a dog, vandalise a mosque and kidnap a woman. It’s a no-brainer.
Part of the stupidity is to fail to conceive that modern artists themselves may possibly have a sense of humour. It never seems to occur to sceptics that a lot of contemporary art contains its own self-parody. It is not some leaden authoritarian enterprise. Take Tom Friedman’s sculpture Big Big Mac, which this week went on display at the Milan Triennial. Friedman has reproduced a Big Mac on a colossal scale and hung it on the wall vertically like a painting. Is it a homage to fast food? A modern still life? Whatever it is, it makes you laugh. It makes me laugh, anyway – a lot more than the inane Dallas Twitterstorm does.
Friedman is joking about the tradition of art that looks like life, and real objects that get accepted as art. His giant burger alludes to Claes Oldenburg’s pop art hamburgers of the 1960s, which are similarly inflated in scale. Oldenburg was celebrating old-fashioned New York diners: his burgers are homemade and homely. By contrast, Friedman celebrates the corporate Big Mac – always the same wherever you are. Just bigger, this time.
It’s totally humourless to fail to see the self-conscious comedy of modern art. Of course, Tracey Emin knew that putting her own bed on display was absurd. That’s part of the outrage. And of course Andy Warhol thought it was funny to exhibit Brillo boxes (or rather, his replicas of them) as art.
Sadly, the joke is on the Dallas prankster. Far from either a cutting satirist or a conceptual genius, Jack is just someone who doesn’t get the joke.
