What does it mean and who decides?
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a piece of artwork to the allegedly “unjuried” Society of Independent Artists’ Salon in New York, which meant that any submission should be accepted as long as the application fee was paid.
He submitted a urinal flipped on its side and titled the work “Fountain”.
The submission was rejected, presumably because it couldn’t have been art.
The rejection stirred much discussion and controversy within the art community.
It forced some fundamental existential questions to the surface: What is art? And who gets to decide?
This type of crisis isn’t new to the art community — virtually every era of art is characterized in part by the ways in which it challenged the values, conventions, and authority of the work it succeeded.
Beyond art, this feels like the lifecycle of how meaning and value are created.
Every season and seemingly every domain of humanity is met with some kind of David-and-Goliath moment — a tug-of-war between convention and a Challenger fighting for recognition and legitimacy.
It takes a lot of bravery, persistence, and frankly, maybe some naive confidence to say “I believe we should go left” when the rest of the world — one’s peers, colleagues, best friends — insist “Right is the way.”
