Response to Rosler

While reading Shedding the Utopian Moment, the quote by Kaprow, "non-art is more art than ART-art," caught my attention. I have always found ready-made art pieces to be insulting. The idea of someone being able to simply choose an object at random, stick it on a pedestal and declare it to be art infuriates me. I feel like the artist should be responsible in some way for the objects creation, whether it be the design or the actual process of constructing the artwork. Duchamp did not create the design for the urinal, nor did he construct one himself to be displayed as "Fountain". However, Kaprow's quote has made me realize that there is another aspect to art that, until this point, I had not accepted. Kaprow speaks of the universe, down to particles of lint and dust, as being more spectacular than anything an artist could create. I would like to think that a ready-made sculpture is a way of bringing attention to the beauty of ordinary objects, and the credit of bringing attention to the artistic nature of the objects would belong to the artist of the ready-made sculpture. Despite the fact that no physical alterations were made, the artist created an alteration in setting, taking the ordinary object out of its natural environment so that the beauty of the object could be revealed to the audience.