“Ready made” Creativity: The concept of Duchamp in Creativity
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Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was ahead of his time. Even today, few really understand the purpose of their works. However, his critique of the art regime became the basis of contemporary art. He was and still is a reference of the current artists, and his work continues to influence not by his aesthetic, but by his unique and daring behavior, ironizing the regime of the art.
At that time, those who dictated what was or wasn’t art were the galleries and exhibition spaces; whom art dealers and gallery owners wanted to exhibit, was considered an artist. Artists were also limited to painting, sculpture, writing, and music to express themselves. Duchamp showed how banal the art could be; within those conditions, any object could be considered art.
As a consequence, Duchamp comes up with the term “ready-made”; any raw material is used to create art. Words, ink tubes, even industrialized objects such as the urinal and the bicycle wheel exposed by him became masterpieces. And just like that the artist loses his identity as artist-painter and becomes just the one who shows something.
Now art has only symbolic value. It’s a game of appearances giving strength to words, where the title of the work has the ability to determine an entire artistic concept by itself. The titles of Duchamp’s ready-made clarified not only the works themselves but also the functioning of art at that time. Doing that, Duchamp gave birth to the conceptual art, where the work no longer has an aesthetic value, because its value lies to its meaning in a given context.
Duchamp’s concept of ready-made validates the intention of the work, which in fact becomes an open interpretation dependent on the repertoire of the reader, the observation of the critics and the relation between the artist and his work.
In Creativity nothing is completely original; all creation is based on something, that can be an object, idea, theory, tendency or art already existing. It also can be based on our influences, how we use our references or in what we created before.
Creativity is ready-made.
Like art, creativity is subjective. It is open to interpretations and experiences, but it follows this pattern of using what came before as raw material for creation, as well as Duchamp’s ready-made works. In this sense, it is the way in which the elements are configured that makes it original.
