7 ms·

"Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically..." I got a real kick out of this line. At

by parsimo2010 6y ago

"Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically..." I got a real kick out of this line. At first I thought it was pure nonsense. After a bit of searching I found out that Marcel Duchamp was an artist that made some art called "readymades." Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.

bobthepanda 6y ago
For more context, Duchamp literally submitted a signed urinal to an art exhibition.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dhritzkiv 6y ago
That's quite interesting as I would consider Duchamp as modern art history 101 and his readymades are the prototypical examples of subversive art / anti-art.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Given the state of arts funding at least in the US, and depending on how old you are, people tend to forget these things. The last art history class I took was my sophmore year of high school. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget particulars if it's that long ago.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  Duchamp's art also (arguably) marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism - our current era. It's definitely modern, but it has little hints of postmodernism in it. I've never taken an art history class, but I do know of Duchamp, and I do think his name is known by anyone with even a passing curiosity with the world of art. The fact that he's relatively unknown here says a lot about the users of this site: highly knowledgeable folks, whose knowledge is probably much more specialized that they realize.
woodruffw 6y ago
> Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me. I want to thank you for commenting on this. It's been said before, but: technologists have a tendency to attempt and derive every other field from their own first principles and, when they fail to do so, discount fields as "pure nonsense." We all (non-technologists included) benefit from not falling into that mode of thought.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Do you have any evidence of this tendency outside of SV?
  - snakeboy 6y ago
    What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? Anything anyone says is gonna be anecdotal. Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.
    - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
      >What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? I like how this is phrased. It's a more pithy question than the one I generally use with people who have loosely defined interrogatives or claims, which is: "What proof would you need to make you believe otherwise"
    - thanhhaimai 6y ago
      To be fair, a lot of people I know who are outside of stem also don't view non-stem fields in a shiny light. It's not a phenomenal inside CS. We as a society value stem fields higher and pay them more on average.
    - notJim 6y ago
      I studied aerospace engineering and the same was true. I suspect it's the case in many engineering and science fields.
grenoire 6y ago
Sometimes I read expert-written blog posts or articles, targeted at a demographic the author is familiar in communicating with. My brain will literally just turn off and I will go into a reading trance where I don't understand the text because my brain simply says 'yeah this is nonsense, don't get it.' Very interesting phenomenon.
- abathur 6y ago
  When I was working on my MFA thesis, I came to a realization that feels like it might overlap with what you're describing. It's a little hard to put a bow on the idea (and why it isn't trite...) at this length, but basically: I felt a connection between the experience of trying to parse some intentionally difficult/impenetrable ~modernist texts, and the experience of trying to parse older texts where the phrasing is dated. They're too unfamiliar to parse with fluent ease, and the experience of fluent reading is just fundamentally different. In one case, the text is like a Rubik's cube, and in the other it's hard to even realize it exists separately from your instantaneous understanding of it.
ashtonkem 6y ago
It's also important to understand the context of any artistic movement. Dadaism was a response to futurism and other pro-industrial artistic movements that were very popular during the lead up to WW1. Dadaists were part of an artistic recoiling from the horrors of WW1 and anything that even smacked of the sentiments that were felt to have lead up to such a catastrophe. This far from WW1, the whole thing seems a bit silly because we're not part of the time and mental place that made such movements tick originally.
StavrosK 6y ago
To be fair, it is pretentious writing. Who uses "Duchampian" instead of "Duchamp's"? That paragraph can be written much more simply without losing any nuance.
- nulbyte 6y ago
  I would imagine there is considerable intersection between people who say Duchampian with people who say Orwellian, Freudian, or Kafkaesque. It seems to me a fairly normal English construction.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "I read an Orwellian novel" when talking about 1984.
    - hamburglar 6y ago
      Of course you wouldn't, because being Orwell, it's Orwellian by definition. But you could call another author's book Orwellian. Just as the quote in question was probably referring to things that are Duchamp-like, as opposed to just Duchamp's.
    - datameta 6y ago
      One can imagine a context where the qualities referenced aren't specific or limited to 1984. In such a case it would be perfectly apt to reference Orwell's writing style or body of ideas more globally.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Duchamp's readymade and Duchampian readymade don't mean the same thing. A skilled imitator could create a Duchampian readymade, but it wouldn't be Duchamp's work. https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another-fucking-readymade/5486 https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another...
manigandham 6y ago
That's how any field would be if you don't know the jargon, history and technicalities. Is it the fact that it's art that led your first thought to consider it "pure nonsense"?
- sharkweek 6y ago
  If I listen to my psychologist friend talk with their other psychologist friends about the DSM it’s total gibberish to me. Same goes for anytime I need any work done on my car other than an oil change.
BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
They kind of had to mention Duchamp since the artwork is slightly derivative of one of Duchamp's famous artwork which features glass panes broken during transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM
30minAdayHN 6y ago
This was also the case while prepping for GRE. I realized that reading comprehension questions were hard because the passages were referring to completely alien concepts which I had no intuitive comprehension of. I used to totally screw up when passages were referring to art, finance, culture etc. Realized that I should develop comfort in understanding remote fields, not necessarily just the vocabulary. I spent a lot of time reading articles from very diverse areas which I thought ultimately helped handling them better. I immediately realized that is the case even here when I read that quoted line. In my case, when I read such things, I just skim past them. It takes some effort to slow down and actually dig a bit more to form the understanding.
ska 6y ago
Every field has it's own jargon and natural/comfortable modes of expression. Pretty interesting things can happen at the boundaries between fields, when you are trying to translate.
cronix 6y ago
I believe this is similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect. > In essence, people recognise that the media gets virtually everything wrong in media reports they know something about but credulously accept media accounts about everything else where they actually themselves know nothing. https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/ https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/

bobthepanda 6y ago

For more context, Duchamp literally submitted a signed urinal to an art exhibition.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dhritzkiv 6y ago

That's quite interesting as I would consider Duchamp as modern art history 101 and his readymades are the prototypical examples of subversive art / anti-art.

bobthepanda 6y ago
Given the state of arts funding at least in the US, and depending on how old you are, people tend to forget these things. The last art history class I took was my sophmore year of high school. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget particulars if it's that long ago.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
Duchamp's art also (arguably) marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism - our current era. It's definitely modern, but it has little hints of postmodernism in it. I've never taken an art history class, but I do know of Duchamp, and I do think his name is known by anyone with even a passing curiosity with the world of art. The fact that he's relatively unknown here says a lot about the users of this site: highly knowledgeable folks, whose knowledge is probably much more specialized that they realize.

woodruffw 6y ago

> Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me. I want to thank you for commenting on this. It's been said before, but: technologists have a tendency to attempt and derive every other field from their own first principles and, when they fail to do so, discount fields as "pure nonsense." We all (non-technologists included) benefit from not falling into that mode of thought.

Chris2048 6y ago
Do you have any evidence of this tendency outside of SV?
- snakeboy 6y ago
  What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? Anything anyone says is gonna be anecdotal. Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.
  - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    >What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? I like how this is phrased. It's a more pithy question than the one I generally use with people who have loosely defined interrogatives or claims, which is: "What proof would you need to make you believe otherwise"
  - thanhhaimai 6y ago
    To be fair, a lot of people I know who are outside of stem also don't view non-stem fields in a shiny light. It's not a phenomenal inside CS. We as a society value stem fields higher and pay them more on average.
  - notJim 6y ago
    I studied aerospace engineering and the same was true. I suspect it's the case in many engineering and science fields.

grenoire 6y ago

Sometimes I read expert-written blog posts or articles, targeted at a demographic the author is familiar in communicating with. My brain will literally just turn off and I will go into a reading trance where I don't understand the text because my brain simply says 'yeah this is nonsense, don't get it.' Very interesting phenomenon.

abathur 6y ago
When I was working on my MFA thesis, I came to a realization that feels like it might overlap with what you're describing. It's a little hard to put a bow on the idea (and why it isn't trite...) at this length, but basically: I felt a connection between the experience of trying to parse some intentionally difficult/impenetrable ~modernist texts, and the experience of trying to parse older texts where the phrasing is dated. They're too unfamiliar to parse with fluent ease, and the experience of fluent reading is just fundamentally different. In one case, the text is like a Rubik's cube, and in the other it's hard to even realize it exists separately from your instantaneous understanding of it.

ashtonkem 6y ago

It's also important to understand the context of any artistic movement. Dadaism was a response to futurism and other pro-industrial artistic movements that were very popular during the lead up to WW1. Dadaists were part of an artistic recoiling from the horrors of WW1 and anything that even smacked of the sentiments that were felt to have lead up to such a catastrophe. This far from WW1, the whole thing seems a bit silly because we're not part of the time and mental place that made such movements tick originally.

StavrosK 6y ago

To be fair, it is pretentious writing. Who uses "Duchampian" instead of "Duchamp's"? That paragraph can be written much more simply without losing any nuance.

nulbyte 6y ago
I would imagine there is considerable intersection between people who say Duchampian with people who say Orwellian, Freudian, or Kafkaesque. It seems to me a fairly normal English construction.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "I read an Orwellian novel" when talking about 1984.
  - hamburglar 6y ago
    Of course you wouldn't, because being Orwell, it's Orwellian by definition. But you could call another author's book Orwellian. Just as the quote in question was probably referring to things that are Duchamp-like, as opposed to just Duchamp's.
  - datameta 6y ago
    One can imagine a context where the qualities referenced aren't specific or limited to 1984. In such a case it would be perfectly apt to reference Orwell's writing style or body of ideas more globally.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tomjakubowski 6y ago
Duchamp's readymade and Duchampian readymade don't mean the same thing. A skilled imitator could create a Duchampian readymade, but it wouldn't be Duchamp's work. https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another-fucking-readymade/5486 https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another...

manigandham 6y ago

That's how any field would be if you don't know the jargon, history and technicalities. Is it the fact that it's art that led your first thought to consider it "pure nonsense"?

sharkweek 6y ago
If I listen to my psychologist friend talk with their other psychologist friends about the DSM it’s total gibberish to me. Same goes for anytime I need any work done on my car other than an oil change.

BenoitEssiambre 6y ago

They kind of had to mention Duchamp since the artwork is slightly derivative of one of Duchamp's famous artwork which features glass panes broken during transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM

30minAdayHN 6y ago

This was also the case while prepping for GRE. I realized that reading comprehension questions were hard because the passages were referring to completely alien concepts which I had no intuitive comprehension of. I used to totally screw up when passages were referring to art, finance, culture etc. Realized that I should develop comfort in understanding remote fields, not necessarily just the vocabulary. I spent a lot of time reading articles from very diverse areas which I thought ultimately helped handling them better. I immediately realized that is the case even here when I read that quoted line. In my case, when I read such things, I just skim past them. It takes some effort to slow down and actually dig a bit more to form the understanding.

ska 6y ago

Every field has it's own jargon and natural/comfortable modes of expression. Pretty interesting things can happen at the boundaries between fields, when you are trying to translate.

cronix 6y ago

I believe this is similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect. > In essence, people recognise that the media gets virtually everything wrong in media reports they know something about but credulously accept media accounts about everything else where they actually themselves know nothing. https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/ https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/