The after-effects of a trip to the Arts Museum...

Surfing the net, I saw something called "the most influential Art pieces of all time". Naturally, I took a glance.

This was numero uno.


That's right. A humble urinal. You know, those little things in the toilet where all you need to do is point and shoot.

It's official name is Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. My first thought obviously, "Excuse me, this is the most influential art piece of all time? All he did is grab it from a toilet, sign it and placed it on a pedestal! I may as well take a picture of my messy bed and sell that as art!" Then I read that someone already did that. Huh.

Then I started thinking about this. Obviously, this piece can't possibly be just about its aesthetics, how it looks. Because hey, a urinal's a urinal, right?

I started to wonder, what CAN be considered true Art? I mean, following Duchamp's example, I could simply take, say, an empty hangar from my wardrobe, hang it on a clothesline full of hangars with clothes and call it an example of the emptiness an unemployed person feels.

Or maybe take the wardrobe itself, open the doors to reveal the untidy mess inside and compare it to the untidy mess of its owner, and indeed, everyone around me.

Or maybe take a piece of marble, put it in the middle of a rickety stool, and say that the marble represents anybody who's at the edge of insanity. One little nudge on the stool is all it takes for the marble to fall.

Or, take this picture:


Simple picture of a mother holding her newborn. Also can be seen as a metaphor, i.e. the baby a new nation and the mother, its citizens in charge of nurturing it to survive in the world.

How about this picture:


A heavily pixellated picture of a clump of hair? Or shall we compare the hair to, say, the evil that exists in the world and the pixellation to our inability to see it, to comprehend it fully?

Or heck, this one:

(Picture, hypothesis of said picture and lame "hair-eating vampires" joke removed because the owner of the picture has threatened severe bodily harm to me for not asking permission from her first. Remember kids, stealing is bad!)

You may call any or all the above superfluous pieces which can't be considered art at all. But are you really certain? And that, I realize for me, is the point of Fountain. It makes you think, "What is Art?".

Me, I think anything can be considered art. My whole life could be considered a performance art work of immensely dull proportions. All you need is a keen eye, and some intelligence. Because you'll need them to see beyond that photo in your album which may or may not be just a simple photo of your cat eating its plate of lasagna.

Or you could make stuff up. That's what I did. That's what I suspect a lot of artists do.

All these thoughts about Fountain are my own. And you'll probably have your own thoughts too. That's the final beauty of this work, of art in general: it can mean anything to anyone, no one idea being the definitive, no one person having the correct answer. It may even mean nothing at all, mirroring the fact that our lives have ultimately no meaning, since eventually, they end. What is the point of this art piece? Ergo, what is the point of life itself?

Heh. Not bad for a piss pot.