So I woke up this morning thinking about the difference between art and pornography and the role of artistic identification. Sometimes I dream about shooting vampires, sometimes I dream about art theory. Go figure.

What really surprised me though was the answer I woke up with, which is that the distinction, on one level, is unnecessary. Not that it can’t be made, but that it needn’t, because really the forces of history and the market will be the ultimate arbiters. I know this sounds like a total tautology, but is it? And this is where I had this awesome (to me) thought about Duchamp and his process of Artistic Identification, which I've always taken at face value: the Artist, by the process of choosing to see things in an aesthetic manner, through his/her judgment, makes a thing, even a urinal, art. But this morning what I thought was: bullshit! Duchamp, with this idea, perhaps the most brilliant move in the history of the game of art, was trying to DESTROY ART. Because following his reasoning to its logical conclusion, everything is art, and so nothing is.

But Duchamp, ironically, FAILED to destroy art and instead became one of it’s modern founders. Because the act of identification, ultimately, resides not with the artist but with those two forces mentioned earlier: money and time. My Cynical Theory or Artistic Identification.

Oh, and I saw the governor of Oregon at the Twilight room last night.

I'll let that sink in. For those of you in Reno, that would be like seeing your governor at, say, the Cue and Cushion or the Cork Room. What was he doing? Dunno. Drinking, it seemed like, with some friends. Absolutely surreal.

Labels: art, politics