Lyotard - Courtney Sparling

For this reading, I found it to be very overwhelming. There was a lot of information presented and I feel as if Lyotard's theory is very complex and that I am missing some major points. But I think I have grasped an overall picture of what the theory includes. The first line in the reading that sparked my understanding is:

"Duchamp's 'ready-made' does nothing but actively and parodistically signify this constant process of dispossession of the craft of painting or even of being an artist. As Thierry de Duve penetratingly observes, the modern aesthetic question is not 'What is beautiful?' but 'What can be said to be art (and literature)?'"

Last Spring, I took a class called Introduction to Visual Culture (an art history class). When I read the name Duchamp in this week's reading, I quickly remembered his piece called, Fountain. This work of art is basically a urinal he took and transformed into art. He wrote, "R. Mutt 1917" on the urinal, and that was the only physical change that Duchamp made to it. I remember it was considered part of the "readymades," which were all ordinary objects taken out of their context and put on display as art. Simply by signing the urinal, Fountain was born as a work of art and no longer something seen everyday in a bathroom.

This also brings me back to the questions, "What is beautiful?" and "What can be said to be art (and literature)?" When I first saw the image of Fountain, I asked myself, "Why would people consider this art and why would Duchamp want a urinal to be art. I feel as if Lyotard is using Duchamp as an example of his readymade art as a whole to further explain the effects of "realisms of industry and mass communications to painting and the narrative arts." I see the readymades as art that represents the industry and masses. A urinal is a simple object, but in art, where "anything goes," a urinal can also be anything. 

I also feel like Duchamp's work relates to the quote in the reading that states: 

"Instead of the work of art having to investigate what makes it an art object and whether it will be able to find an audience, political academicism possess and imposes a priori criteria of the beautiful, which designate some works and a public at a stroke and forever." 

A line in the reading that really confuses me is:

"The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done." 

I believe that what this quote is saying is that artists and people who are working creatively do not necessarily create within a set of guidelines or rules. I feel that they must create their own rules and standards of what art is and also at the same time, "invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented." Artists have to take what cannot be seen and reveal it to the world. I have to try to think about how abstract the concepts are that the postmodern artists incorporate into their works. I also feel that Duchamp's work is a precursor to what postmodern art has come to be known as.