Now that's funny.

I chuckled at that, too.

The only thing I would add is "and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

:D

Completely agree. That "Piss Christ" thing wasn't offensive to me in a religious way (hey, I can't think of anything that is) but putting a plastic crucifixion in a cup of urine, taking a pic and calling it ART?

but, just so you know where I'm coming from, I didn't think Duchamp's Fountain was art OR Tracey Emin's My Bed. Used tampons on a mattress doesn't really do it for me. Though, I have liked some of the other things she's done...

I've got to agree that something should be done about crap being called art. Red Green said it best. "If I can do it, it's not art."

Whether or not you can do it, is less relevant than whether or not you would have thought of it.

It doesn't do anything for me. Nor did the Piss Christ. But...sometimes art is a rebellion against its own conventions. Can you think of anything more diametrically opposed to renaissance religious art than this Frog, or Piss Christ? Though Piss Christ is certainly a striking image and carries with it a sense of weight because of the ground it treads upon.

Not my cup of tea, but I would be uncomfortable about saying it isn't art when I do not know enough about the artist's intentions.

oh you did NOT just go there.
do NOT diss duchamp.
i love dada. dada is unquestionably art... or, rather, anti-art.

there is a line somewhere about what is and isn't art... but dada is on the art side of that line.

I have no idea whatthe artist intended but for all I know he could have been commenting on the deification of popular culture and self-gratification.

Dada...I don' like it.

I'm allowed to not like things.

And as far as the artist's intention...well, Piss Christ I certainly DO recall, so if the artists intention was to disturb, he did disturb and disgust me (for I don't swallow every artists...um...bullshit about what they did when they got high and "created" something) Some of it is scam, don't you think? I also recall Guernica----it's very disturbing but to mine eyes, it's truly art.

I daresay. I'm not versed enough in art to truly know:P I know what I like.

Not to get too off the subject, Ibram, but did you ever read The Purloined Poe? with Lacan and Derrida, a "psychoanalytic reading."

well, that book reminds me of dada art. It's like, WTF? Perhaps I am too provincial to "get" it---but I knows what I likes and I don't like hocus pocus parading as art. If I get a sink, throw it on a table and call it art, is it art?

Dont worry, that whole concept of blasphemy is sooo out. The Vat would've stood a better chance if they'd registered the crucifiction racket and sued for copyright infringement. :p

It depends on what you were thinking when you did it.

Certainly, bonus points if you manage to communicate that thought to the viewer, but if they don't "get it" it's probably their fault.

The problem for me with this piece is that it's...clumsy. I can see what the parts are supposed to say--you have the frog splayed out like a biology specimen, all victim-like; egg is on the one hand like life or food, beer is on the other like pleasure or vice, crucifix is FU to religion and/or signifies torture...but it lacks cohesiveness. And a sense of elegance, which successful art has. It's just bad art.

I agree with the cheesy frog not being art.

My mom was an artist and always took me to modern art exhibitions- remember funk art? But when I was 16 I came to NYC by myself and was in the Museum of Modern Art looking at painted I-beams when I decided that less was less and it wasn't art anyway. Went off to look at the Monets and Picasso's Guernica instead, because that was art.