Vandalism or Appropriation:
The relationship between collective art and social activism
Written by Milad Houshmandzadeh, published in Aftab Net magazine, No. 52, 2021
In this regard, one wonders if everything made and presented by an artist should be called art or if finding out whether certain “things” are considered art or not depends on a fact other than being produced by an artist. Do artists are the only ones creating artworks? Or can anything be considered artwork as soon as someone names it so? And lastly, do we have to protect and preserve anything we once called art forever? Or there are artistic productions whose production is accomplished by destroying or altering something else. If we accept Spinoza’s “all determination is negation,” every form of production is accompanied by the destruction of something else. Consider Sherry Levine’s use of appropriation when she reproduced Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” with an extra gold coating.