Now I don’t know much about art. I’m interested in it, I appreciate it and I like what I like, but I don’t know what is good or bad. So apologies if this post screams of ignorance, but after reading this about Marcel Duchamp it got me thinking about the kind of art that those of us in communications are paid to produce and what we could learn from him. Duchamp had a really interesting perspective on art and it seems pretty relevant given the debate surrounding the future of planning, agencies and the general changes in modern marketing.

This post isn’t about commercial art versus art, or intended to suggest that visual art is dead. I simply found Duchamp’s perspective thought provoking. How’s that for sitting on the fence!

Whilst Duchamp eventually came to despise retinal art and the bourgeois, he started off by wanting to create a new kind of art that engaged the mind. Duchamp wondered if he could create works of art that were not conventionally works of art. This became known as conceptual art.

According to the Oxford English dictionary a concept is: “an idea of something formed mentally, combining all its characteristics or particulars.” This suggests to me that there are many different elements to the concept and not just visual and copy. Seems obvious and straightforward. So why the debate about who owns ideas?

In my agency, concepts are the things we review. No reason why it’s called this over creative it just is and always has been. I would argue that in a ‘traditional process’ quite often what is reviewed isn’t really a concept – at least not just yet. All the other ‘characteristics’ and ‘particulars’ haven’t been developed, such as the media for arguments sakes. It’s essentially just an idea at this stage. In other words a concept can’t be CREATED without varying perspectives and input.

Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’ are also something we can learn from. He purposefully aimed to break every rule in art in order to engage people’s minds in unpredictable ways so he could provoke the observer to participate and think rather than it just being aesthetic to the eye. And to top it off he believed in art that was free of pretence and artifice. He’s a clever bloke in my book.

However, probably one of the most interesting beliefs of Duchamp is that art occurs at the juncture of the artists’ intention and the observer’s response, ultimately making them a co-creator. If ever there is something that would unite people in agencies today and describe what we should all be striving for in communications this is it. Perhaps this is the art we should get more awards for?