
Arnold Rockman
Does art need artists? The excuse most often given for calling a Duchamp “readymade,” or for that matter a Jasper Johns bronze flashlight, an object of art is that it was selected by an artist and placed on a pedestal by him. The archaeologist, on the other hand, who presumably is not an artist also “finds” things from other or earlier civilizations and places them on pedestals; and we call them “art.” What if a non-artist, non-archaeologist, were asked to “find” some everyday things from our contemporary civilization and to place them on a stand? This was the gist of the innocent question posed