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Sunday, March 27, 2016

“duh? Art & Stupidity” at Focal Point

Lily van der Stokker
(link)

Stupid feels like an imprecise word when the history of art since Manet could be seen as evidence toward a theory of stupidity in art. Wasn't that luncheon an example of acting stupidly in the face of the era's high ideals. Duchamp's Fountain was stupid. Pollock claimed to be as stupid as nature. Minimalism was defacto stupid. Nauman, stupid. Appropriation, stupidity's bedrock. And if we define stupidity as the lack of intelligence, and intelligence is seen as a codified measurement of what a society accredits as valuable, then artists are almost by defintion a displacement of that system.