ABSTRACT
What is art? That’s not an easy question to answer. There are so many different things that we call art, but some of them probably don’t merit the name. Most people would acknowledge that a Rembrandt self-portrait and a fugue by J.S. Bach are art, but there are many cases that are likely to be contentious. There isn’t even agreement about Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘Fountain’, a porcelain urinal that he signed ‘R. Mutt’ and displayed in an open art exhibition in New York in 1917: to some this is a central example of twentieth-century art, whereas to others it is just a sensationalist gesture that was more like a critical comment about art exhibitions, or even a joke, than a work of art itself.
