Cinderblock / Matt Sigmon - Fresh 2009 Emerging Artists Exhibit
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Uploaded by AVAArts on Sep 16, 2009
Conceptual artist, Matt Sigmon, made his own cinderblock from scratch. He then took it to a nearby Home Depot, brought it inside the store, and purchased it for $2.13. The event was filmed. In Matt Sigmon's own words:
When Jean Baudrillard asserted that the banality of art had merged with the banality of the real world, he was highlighting the potential that today every object, without distinction, could be called art. Marcel Duchamp, with the advent of the readymade, helped to achieve this end. As a result, the aesthetics of the commonplace object can bear the same aesthetic importance as fine art objects. Consequentially, visual aesthetics is no longer a defining characteristic of art. Therefore, the last bastion of arts purpose lies in the thoughts the object can elicit in the viewer.
My work explores the dichotomy of the banal consumer commodity and the fine art object. The objects I create are handcrafted copies of original, industrially manufactured commodities.
Fine art is often presented as one form of commodity in a wider field of cultural commodity production and consumption. This quandary presented by the commoditized art object raises the issue of how value is determined. Does an objects worth stem from the uniqueness of artistic labor used to create it? Does the art object always permeate an aesthetic value that overrides commodity value? Does the art objects value come from the conceptualization that is possible when viewing it within a particular location or context? When does a cinderblock cease to exist as mere building material? Can meanings and ideas contained within particular objects accrue additional monetary value beyond the initial monetary value of the materials/functionality of the given object?
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That was totally pointless. WOW! You made a brick and purchased it. How exactly is that art??? It isn't a quandary - it was an exercise in time wasting...
john79g 9 months ago
Is the work of art the block (as in Duchamp's "fountain"), the "performance" (the act of buying it from the store), or the documentary made of the act (the "record")?
Better yet, by allowing you to purchase your homemade block from them, is Home Depot at all liable for damages incurred if it proves to be substandard?
grouchomarx4 2 years ago