I received a few emails about the previous post asking whether the medication had run out and suggesting that I should go and have a nice lie down.

I gave the wrong impression about Duchamp - I have a lot of time for the artist and for his contribution. Remember that this happened at the start of the Dada movement, after WWI when the world was falling apart and the values exhibited by the cosy and comfortable world of the bourgeoisie and their art just didn't make sense any longer. That gives strength and meaning to a gesture which otherwise could just be seen as playful and empty. Duchamps contribution was wider, both as an artist and by his association and collaboration with his contemporaries, particularly Picabia and Man Ray.

So I wasn't blaming him for the current predominance of conceptualism.

I rejoice in the diversity that our culture and art is capable of providing. My safety valve goes off when I perceive this being eroded. I think we can see that happening everywhere, in the globalising uniform dreariness of Macdonalds and Starbucks, to the dumbing down of the media and of course conceptualism in art. This came home to me just by recent visits to independent galleries. Conceptualism seems to me to be the Japanese knotweed of the art world, starving everything else of oxygen and the space to grow.

But I aint going to change anything so I should just take it easy. Maybe we need another Marcel Duchamp to put a bomb under what has become the cosy comfortable bourgeois art of the 21st century

When Duchamp submitted his urinal to the New York art whatsit he committed an act of genius, He said to all those bourgeois with their nice pictures

- "you think that's art? you don't know nuthin. this is art, and it's art because I say it is, and you can't prove otherwise and in fact the very act of me saying that it is art is art itself".

Little did he think or know that he was instigating the biggest commercial phenomenon known to man. Conceptual Art - or how to make squillions of dollars out of absolutely nothing. A few big dealers and so called artists just fix it all up and con some folk with a load of money who need to buy some cultural credibility to carry around on the glitterati circuit and who don't know any better and all the VAn Goghs are sold anyway. Now these guys are in luck, because they have the market sown up. But they're greedy like all sorts of people with lots of money so they need to find the best way to make more and more quickly. Duchamp to the rescue. "We'll just take whatever we like and call it Art and sell it for lots of money - no-one cares - they just want to know the cost, and no-one can tell us it's not Art. And it's no good just taking a photograph of 1 highway intersection - we'll need 12, or 15, or a 100 and make them really big. Oh and try and make sure there are no cars or people in them, we need to try and have some kind of critical focus in case someone asks. Or how about getting 24 soup cans and filling them with sand, or maybe we'll fill one with sea shells, and, no, lets turn all the ones with sand upside down so we have a lot of little soup-castles, Campbells soup, mind you and, or maybe we could get a box and fill it with.. i don't know... hard boiled eggs and toothbrushes or something or maybe you could just empty the contents of your fridge into a plastic bag and hang it from the ceiling, whatever, anything'll do. We'll let a few critics and pundits in on it and they'll tell us why it's art and all the rich people'll want to buy it.

I just read an interview given by Hilla Becher to the German Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and translated by Joerg Colberg on his blog

I don't want to explain who Hilla Becher is here, but the interview is interesting, and worth reading. However I'd been reading several things this morning and the following exchange caught my attention. (Please bear in mind this is taken out of context of the whole article as it appears on Joergs site)

SZ: So then he took photos?

HB: Right. He borrowed a 35mm camera and took photos, to use them for his sketches. That's how it started, photography as the means to an end.

SZ: That sounds like the mentality of a historian or someone archiving things. Did you consider yourselves as artists at all?

HB: What is an artist? Calling yourself an artist does not make you one, that's for others to decide. It doesn't make any sense to say: I am an artist!"

The interviewer brings into question what makes an artist, and gets a bit of a rebuff. This chimed in with the other things I'd been reading, or remembering.

In E H Gombrichs "The Story of Art" he disarmingly tells us at the start that there is no such thing as art, only artists. Art is what artists do... This bears thinking about. It supposes that we do not have rules against which some artifact is judged, and then considered art, or not art. And after that, art, but not good art. Thank goodness! However it supposes that we have criteria that enable us to decide who is an "artist". And whatever they do, be it the Sistine Chapel or pissing in the street is then art. On the whole, I prefer the latter.

In either case, however, there must be some kind of panel somewhere which judges. That is what Becher is alluding to when she says "That is for others to decide". But what others? The photographer Josef Koudelka is well known for his reticence - "I just take photographs - what they mean is up to others" What they mean, and whether they are "art" is subtly different, although I would like to think that art involves meaning in some way, Does he have some kind of jury in mind? I don't think so. Who then are the arbitrators in todays world - the public, the wealthy patrons, the punters/commentators/critics? There is no objective value in "art". The loudest voices or the deepest pockets decide.

Sometimes an "artist" has a view. Picasso had been elevated to this ephemeral position at the time he commented on Bonnard's paintings, something mentioned in Michael Kimmelmans "Accidental Masterpieces". He didn't rate Bonnard, his art was outdated and couldn't stand with the progressive work characterised by his own. This was bullying, from a position of power, but also an indication of fashion - that other decider in what is "art" at any given time. Bonnard is on the up, but whether he will replace his critic is still down to "others".