Thirty years ago, Gabriel Orozco placed an empty shoe box on a gallery floor – a space to hold ideas within an impersonal space - and called it art. The public kicked it, not knowing it was supposed to be art. The art world was skeptical, but accepted it as art.
Jewellers know their work is art. Ultimately, this doesn’t matter because jewelry is excluded from the art world – its schools, museums, magazines, awards, and white cubes.
This empty jewelry box, displayed on a body (which is also excluded from the art world), can’t be art.
Newman said of his zips: “My work, in terms of social impact, suggests the possibility of an open society, of an open world and not of a closed institutional one.” This is what jewelry does. It is not locked away or part of the closed institutions of the art world – but out, open in the world, with all of the freedom and lack of control this entails.
There is no such thing as a lone genius
Duchamp wasn’t a lone genius.
It wasn’t just “Duchamp’s” Fountain
Women were involved.
Ades, Dawn (2019) Duchamp’s Fountain and the feminist avant garde in New York. The Guardian Apr 3.
Hustvedt, Siri (2019) A woman in the men's room: when will the art world recognise the real artist behind Duchamp's Fountain? The Guardian, Mar 29.