Editor's Note, 3/6

Though I am unsure of the truth of his words, a friend of mine recently told me that maintenance faculty are not allowed to clean the Duke sculpture studio for fear that they might mistakenly throw out student work. He mentioned it to me when we stumbled across a story about a cleaning woman working in a gallery in Italy. She had accidentally thrown $15 thousand worth of art by modernist Paul Branca that consisted of crumpled cardboard and newspaper which had been scattered across the floor. Supposedly, it was the artist’s “commentary on the environment.”

Many artists and art historians consider Marcel Duchamp's 1917 “readymade” work “Fountain” a landmark of the avant-garde movement. Duchamp, a part of the anti-rational Dadaist artistic movement which sought to question the artistic establishment, attempted to display this work—a porcelain urinal with the name “R.Mutt” scrawled across it—at a prominent exhibition. It was quickly rejected even though the exhibition fee had been paid. Despite this rejection, the work garnered an amazing amount of attention and became a cornerstone of American art because it called into question what artwork we choose to imbue with value or even what we chose to consider art at all.

With a simple toilet bowl, Duchamp examined the nature of legitimating models and institutions. Sometimes these models and institutions can be as simple as an exhibition, a gallery or even a frame. Objects that are usually considered nothing but trash can suddenly be worth $15 thousand dollars when positioned in the right way and to the right audience. The evaluation of art, as well as so many things in life, is a matter of the framing.

We live in a world where the rules of the game have already been created. We put our blind faith in established institutions of power and rarely take the time to consider whether these institutions ever really deserved our faith in the first place. More often than not, these organizations and individuals derive their power in joining a discourse that is Western-biased and privileges predominantly white, straight male narratives.

This year, playing off my belief that Kanye West is a self-absorbed narcissist with a messiah complex, I decided to send valentines to several friends reading, “I love you almost as much as Kanye loves Kanye.” However, after his recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, I reexamined my own beliefs about what is deserving of value in our society.

In response to those who questioned his art, Kanye turned to Kimmel and said, “It's not about racism anymore, it's classism... Classism is when they try to say, ‘You’re a rapper…your girl is on a reality show so you’re not up here with us. We’re old money.’ It's snobbery... A lot of people say, ‘You have to do music.’ I'm gonna keep doing music... [but] I'm only 36 years old. I have other dreams.” He says race is an issue that excludes him from other artistic forms: “Currently in fashion, there's no black guy at the end of the runway, in all honesty. Who do you know who's more known for clothes than me? It's like, how can you get a shot? No real designers will work with a rapper.” Kanye makes a fair point. Why, as a black man, do people respect him as a rapper but refuse to give him a chance in the fashion world? Undeniably, his aesthetic has made a big cultural impact. While people found it absurd that he had the recent audacity to create “leather jogging pants,” I couldn’t help but feel that if a “performance artist” or other “serious performer” had done something similar, the media would have instead commended such a person for asking questions about the nature of fashion.