Fiona Long Art

Scraped

Originally uploaded by fionalongart.

I just had to publish this wonderful comment I received from Adrienne O’Toole on my Urban Decay statement of intent. What a thoughtful and inciteful response. I persoanally love Duchamp and museums but it’s good to open up the debate!

“I love to hear of someone being that awake to their senses and being that sensitive to beauty. And the beauty of decay is a very delicate thing. The Japanese have a great traditional sensitivity to this and even have words for it - I think they call it Sabi-Wabi when they see the beauty of something no longer beautiful.

But I must protest mildly. The things you are seeing aren’t “art”, what you are seeing is “beauty”, a strange and magical quality that human beings are gifted to be able to glimpse. Things have to be made to be art, because the word art has always been related to artefacts, to skill, to craft and endeavour.
Art is something made, but beauty may be found.

I am, actually, quite opposed to what has been made of Duchamp’s readymades. I think when he put a urinal in an art gallery his comment was a crude and harsh criticism of galleries themselves and they tried, as a riposte, to absorb his comment and turn it back into some ossified and overvalued moment in history, which is what galleries are good at.
But I think Duchamp was right, galleries are the sort of toilets of culture, where art is petrified and abused and washed of meaning and stuffed with pomposity by some ghastly act of academic taxidermy.

So I hope those raw objects you spot keep inspiring you, and I hope you can find better homes for your art than the hallowed mausoluea of museum halls.

XX
A”