Art and a Pineapple

What qualifies as a work of art?

That's not a new question, but rather an ever-present one, at least since around the turn of the 20th century when non-representational, or highly distorted images, came to dominate cutting edge artistic activity and when "found objects" became viewed as equally legitimate to a work that might have taken months to create and only with great skills of one sort or another.

Now comes the celebrated case of the Pineapple, which reopens the question for, one suspects, a lot of younger people who have never previously given the issue much thought.





In a nutshell, a couple of Scottish university students placed a store-bought pineapple on an otherwise vacant table in an art show and walked away. A janitor apparently subsequently covered it with a glass display case and there it sat for about a week before it was removed. Naturally, it quickly became a social-media phenomenon because that's how the world works these days.

One might quickly conclude that the pineapple was just as much a legitimate object of art as Marcel Duchamp's famous (or infamous depending on one's point of view) urinal.

But there is an important difference. Duchamp was a recognized artist. The pineapple-bearing students were not.

At its core, a work of art is something that realizes the intent of an artist -- an accepted definition that helps to legitimize conceptual art as well as things along the lines of found objects.

So who then qualifies as an artist? That would then seem to be the most important question.

A some point, this posting was going to get around to talking about a book and the time is now. Those interested in trying to come to terms with this question might want to get a hold of a copy of "Seven Days in the Art World," by Sarah Thornton, first published in paperback in 2009.

She deals, in a very readable form, with that question and an a host of other art controversies in her book and I recommend it.

Since the 1960s, she says, MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degrees have become the first legitimator of who is an artist, followed by awards and residencies; reviews and features in art magazines; inclusion in prestigious private collections; museum validation in the form of solo or group shows; international exposure at well-attended biennials, or, finally, appreciation signaled by strong resale interest at auction.

On that basis, the students who placed the pineapple on the vacant table were not artists and thus the pineapple is not a work of art.

Then again, many artists refuse to say what the objects they create "are."  Whatever it means to you is what it is, one often hears.  On that basis, one could argue that artists themselves are opening up their field to all comers.

If anyone found that pineapple aesthetically meaningful, one can argue it is just as valid as art as a pile of bricks placed in a museum by someone deemed by generally accepted criteria to be an artist.

Comments are welcome.