Philip Prager Creativity

In Phillip Prager's article titled, “Making an Art of Creativity: The Cognitive Science of Duchamp and Dada”1, Prager specifically wants to assure people that Duchamp's piece Fountain should in fact be considered art. He states that, “Dada's redefinition of art in terms of creativity is perhaps most poignant in Duchamp's readymades found objects that he allegedly transformed into works of art merely by signing and placing them within an art context”(4). He goes on to say that any of the judgements of the piece or reactions that he has seen so far, even the positive ones, do not do the piece justice to its creativity. When he was taught in school what art was he was told to look for the signs of four domains and it if contained them all then …show more content…
One reason that he gives for Duchamp being creative has to do with the signature of Mutt. Duchamp had stated before that Mutt comes from Mott Works the name of the sanitary equipment manufacturer and the daily cartoon strip that went by Mutt and Jeff. So the name not only traces the artwork back to the factory that it was made in but the urinal also has the general shape that resembled a fat cartoon character that was in the familiar comic book strip. Prager goes on to say that he agrees with some of his other colleagues that an artist cannot repeat this type of “art” forever or it would lose its affect that it makes on the audience. He even goes as far as to say that it would become a cliché, but when it is done periodically the style of ready made art can comment on the nature of art itself. Prager quotes Duchamp later in his essay in which he says to an interviewer that, “You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion”(5). This shows that Duchamp shares the idea with others that the Dada art movement is almost anti-art because the majority of traditional art relies highly on