These three drawings form a set that I created for the Incognito charity art event in 2023.

The first drawing features Duchamp coming out of his 1917 artwork ‘Fountain’. What Duchamp did was place an ordinary urinal in a gallery. This has led many to believe that what he did was recontextualise the ordinary by placing it within the confines of the gallery. I have written in the past that I think this line of thinking is false. Essentially, I don’t think you can inject an aesthetic idea into an object by placing it in a different location. In the instance of ‘Fountain’ this can even be tested. Simply place the urinal back in the men’s room, next to the other urinals, and it ceases to be an artwork.

The second drawing features Arthur Danto, who in his book The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art proposes a theory that art had reached its end. He wrote this after seeing Warhol’s Brillo Boxes on display at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964. Essentially, I think that Warhol had simply repeated Duchamp’s stunt, without offering much more. Danto took this a step further and proposed that a certain evolution of western art had reached its end and become something else, namely philosophy. I tend to agree with Danto, although I would also add to Danto's proposition that it is philosophy done poorly.

The third drawing features Cattelan emerging from his work ‘Comedian’ which again proposed the idea that an everyday object (this time a banana) could be recontextualised into art simply by locating it in a gallery (actually, it was an art fair). I think enough time had passed between Warhol and Cattelan for the world to forget that this stunt was a repeat of those that had come before.

Taken together the three drawings form cheeky and quirky critiques of the artists, art theorists and the art world. The portrait style and skeletal form are something I regularly use as a stylistic form to allow me to tie together ideas across multiple works.

I could discuss at length the philosophy of aesthetics and the attributes, both positive and negative, of each of these artists and theorists' works. But I think I will leave it here for now.