Philip Glahn

At the last lecture, Professor Glahn came to speak to us. He spoke of the theme of art and technology, as all of our lectures so far have, and of art as a theory.

Professor Glahn spoke of the inauthenticity of mass production versus the quality of being original and made by hand in art. While the greatest fear of people is to be like machines, our greatest desire is to be an individual. Relating to this, artists like Duchamp and his "Fountain" extend their authorship by in a sense collaborating with whoever made the fountain in the mass producing business. Allowing people other than artists into the process of making art, the labors of the artist and the factory worker are equated, and each form of labor comes to include more than original definition. In a sense, this both reskills and deskills the artist. It shows that the artist can view himself not at as complete genious, but a producer of meaning, just as anyone else who preforms the labor of mass production may also be seen as a producer of meaning.

It was actually a very interesting lecture and a thoroughly intriguing concept.