Beyond Duchamp and Warhol - Reclaiming Meaning and Value in Art

In this essay I argue that the seminal artists Duchamp and Warhol creatively changed the trajectory of art but also caused great harm to art and offer little in the way of world-bettering. However, one can extract a positive consequence of such innovations: Duchamp and Dadaism led to an open ontological definition of art while Warhol and pop art is an instance of “what not to do”. The result is a new paradigm where I argue for the moral value in art and the open call to express such value in various modalities which one may or may not call art, it matters not. This circumvents both the cannon of art theory and history as well as practice which includes the power mongering within the institutions of art and in their “marriage” to other larger institutions - political, economic, and so on.