Anti-art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anti-art is the definition of a work which may be exhibited or delivered in a conventional context but makes fun of serious art or challenges the nature of art. The term is attributed to the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp, whose 1917 work Fountain – a urinal – was a prime example of the genre. The work also served as a Dada manifesto and so the movement is connected with Dada. While the Dada movement per se was generally confined to Western Europe in the early 1900s, anti-art has a wider scope.

Since then various avante-garde art movements have a position on anti-art and the term is also used to describe other intentionally provocative art forms, such as nonsense verse.

The intention is to make the territory of art contested and difficult and is therefore a locus of class struggle in bourgeois culture. Mail art, for example operates outside the official art world and is sent from artist to artist. Exhibitions and publications of mail-art are also often arranged outside the art world.

The Stuckist painters claim to make "Anti-anti-art."