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a light bulb is a lovely example of industrial design. the only real difference between industrial design and "art" is that there's no original, just lots of objects which enact the lovely design. the ready-mades were already in some way about this arbitrary distinction, and about the outmodedness of the original, the singular as a normative feature of "art"---so "art" is what the person making an object says is art, what turns up presented as art. or art is about itself (the white square is about painting)...or art is about the situation that prompts you to see something and call it art. no object is self-contained--what defines something as itself is the result of you performing particular conventions, subscribing to particular ways of grouping phenomena, none of which are "necessary" but each of which is functional for you; none of which needs be transparent, but each of which generally is transparent. so you see through the rules rather than think about them, as a famous dead guy once pointed out about chess and language and other games. you'd think that this would be obvious by 2008, given that duchamp put up the readymades almost a century ago and histories of 20th century art started turning up that made this otherwise isolated gesture in a paris gallery into some fold in the zeitgeist about 50 years ago and so and so. but nothing is singular, least of all the present, and slightly less the sense of the past that shapes that particular fiction and how it is performed.
and none of what i'm saying is exclusive either: there are still countless folk who make representational paintings and derive great pleasure from that and sometimes get to sell them and sometimes even making a living from it and that is a fine thing it is hard to make a living doing this sort of work at all and so the world is better because they are out there doing what pleases them and if other people like it so much the better.
but not everyone has to work in the same way and it is simply not up to consumers of cultural commodities to dictate what is and is not anything. this because, put bluntly, making stuff is not about you. lots of folk who are now understood as great and important artist types could not make a living doing it--joseph cornell had a rought time of it; kafka had a rough time of it; joyce had a rough time of it---charles ives was an insurance man and made his music when he wasn't working. on and on. the old-school conception of art is a residuum of an aristocratic order and maybe that's what makes it so difficult for many artist-types to get over and what makes it so likely that those who do end up becoming copies of themselves and why so many folk just stop and maybe that's why so many consumers of such commodities or otherwise fundamentally find something irritating about the fact that there are such people who make stuff and who do not fundamentally care what they think. maybe the problem is that most folk imagine these artist-types in a dysfunctional way.
i wouldn't characterize myself as anything special in this regard, but i know alot of people who make things and i continue in my own peculiar way myself and what we all have in common is that making stuff is the part of the world that's in color and everything else is in black and white and this not in a good way. people do this stuff because they love doing it, and in the end they do it for themselves because they love doing it, and not because they love being adored by other people though that is nice when it happens.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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