Feb. 27 Questions

What is provenance and why is it such an important issue in the art world? The Universal Leonardo project, launched in 2005, focuses on the techniques and processes used by Leonardo da Vinci rather than claiming to determine attribution. Why do you think this shift has taken place?

Provenance is the records related to artwork to document its ownership, and (if you're lucky) its production. The Universal Leonardo project is attempting to document work as being Leonardo's based on how it was made -- analyzing the work itself, rather than a potentially broken, incomplete, or falsified historical provenance.

Review the ifnormation presented in Ch. 8 on Marcel Duchamp's work called Fountain (see Fig. 12). If you had been on teh committee that decided what could and could not be exhibited at the American Society of Independent Artists, would you have allowed this work to be in the show? Why or why not? What would have been your criteria for acceptance or rejection?

I'd like to think that I would've called it art, and allowed it to be shown in the show, but in the context of 1917, I probably would've rejected it.  That being said... I do think of the work as art; art is a process of making or allowing people to see something they've never seen before, or seeing something familiar in a way they may not have seen it.  (And when I say "see", I really mean "perceive", because other senses may be involved.) By that definition, Duchamp's Fountain was definitely art, and the fact that we're still talking about 100 years later is as much proof as is necessary.