About
These are four sketches by Pablo Picasso placed in a washroom setting. Do these sketches still have the same value here as they do in a museum? Click on the sketches to read more about them.

Open the URL on your laptop and adjust the window size to read about Art and Anti Art
Article
Title: 'The Kiss 1967'
Artist: Pablo Picasso 1881–1973
Medium: Graphite on paper


The kiss was one of several erotic motifs – including the embrace and the couple – that occupied Pablo Picasso during the last years of his life, and this graphite on paper drawing depicts a bearded man kissing a young woman. The unbroken lines that make up many elements of the composition – the ear of the woman and the hairline of the man, for instance – perhaps suggest the playful experiments of an experienced draughtsman, while their fluid rhythms might be seen to complement the sensuality of the subject matter.
Title: 'Weeping woman'
Artist: Pablo Picasso 1881–1973
Medium: Graphite and crayon on paper


During 1937 Picasso became obsessed with the motif of a weeping woman, which symbolised for him the anguish and devastation of the Spanish Civil War. The figure first appeared among the sketches for Guernica, his famous depiction of the German bombing raid on a Basque town. He associated her with his mistress Dora Maar, who had been instrumental in encouraging Picasso’s political awareness. He later commented: ‘For years I've painted her in torture forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me.’
Title: 'Etching 24 March 1968 II'
Artist: Pablo Picasso 1881–1973
Medium: Etching on paper


24 March 1968 II shows three female nudes and two smaller male figures. The women adopt provocative poses, and their hair and eyes are elaborately detailed. The standing nude on the left arranges her hair, as she and her kneeling companion - who stretches out her hand - observe the seated nude on the right. This seated nude is also the focus of the male figure shown in profile, so that one theme of the composition would appear to be the act of looking. Picasso contrasts the man's gaze with the dominant exchange enacted between the women. An awareness of the power over men of the naked female body is also suggested through the details of the seated nude, who tweaks her erect nipple and reveals her sexual parts while looking directly outwards to engage the artist's - and the viewer's - desire. 
Title: 'Etching 20 August 1968 I'
Artist: Pablo Picasso 1881–1973
Medium: Etching on paper


Printmaking played an important role in Picasso's art after 1963. He combined existing techniques and invented new ones in a fertile collaboration with the Crommelyncks, with whom he also made the 156  series of 1968-72. The 347 series is remarkable for its extent and for the rate of production, which averaged two prints per day. They are complex works that explore a number of Picasso's related themes, such as circuses, bullfights and the theatre, in a humorous and bawdy manner.
About
One must understand that Duchamp did not think his “readymade” sculptures were aesthetically interesting at all, and thus his contribution was NOT really to elevate everyday objects into art, but to undercut art as being any better than everyday objects. In his own words, “My idea was to choose an object that wouldn’t attract me by its beauty or its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it.” To like Duchamp’s readymades aesthetically is to miss the point. They are not art objects, but objects used in an argument against art, or at least against the beautiful in art. He claimed that the Impressionists were only about the “retinal” aspect of art, and he was reacting against them, the Fauvists, and others. Why people accept his word that the Impressionists were merely about surface beauty escapes me. Just because something has surface beauty doesn’t mean there isn’t more to it. Meanwhile, Duchamp eventually made numbered, singed editions of his readymades for sale. Apparently, while rejecting notions of intrinsic worth in art, he embraced the monetization of art objects, so long as they were his own. So, he was for people buying his own bottle rack as art, but against them buying the same one in the store and keeping it as art.

Open the URL on your laptop and adjust the window size to read about Art and Anti Art
Article
Title: Plastic Plates
Medium: Plastic
Date: December 2021
Caption: Plastic utensils produce harmful toxic byproducts that can contaminate food when heated. The toxic byproducts, known as oligomers, are formed during plastic production and may be poisonous to humans. Colonizers introduced plastci into colonised lands to slowly posion the locals in prisons.
Title: Liquid Foundation
Medium: Glass and plastic
Date: December 2021
Caption: For skin and eye irritation tests, chemicals are rubbed onto the shaved skin or dripped into the eyes of restrained rabbits, without any pain relief.
Title: Milk carton
Medium: Paper and plastic
Date: December 2021
Caption: Milk is derived from cows. Even though the animal is alive when it is milked, the treatment of dairy cows is poor, including steroid use and forced impregnation.
Title: Fake plant
Medium: Plastic
Date: December 2021
Caption: They are made with dyes in large factories they only contribute to our growing pollution problems. Whereas, living plants are absorbed back into the Earth and play into the natural cycle of life.
'Art or Brend'
 Essay by Henry Flynt
Published in 1968
1 Perhaps the most diseased justification the artist can give of his profession is to say that it is somehow scientific. ... It is the creative personality him- or herself who has the most reason to object to the "scientific" justification of art. Again and again, the decisive step in artistic development has come when an artist produces a work that shatters all existing "scientific" laws of art, and yet is more important to the audience than all the works that "obey" the laws. 2 The artist or entertainer cannot exist without urging his or her product on other people. In fact, after developing his or her product, the artist goes out and tries to win public acceptance for it, to advertise and promote it, to sell it, to force it on people. If the public doesn't accept it as first, he or she is disappointed. He or she doesn't drop it, but repeatedly urges the project on them. People have every reason, then, to ask the artist: Is your product good for me even if I don't like or enjoy it? This question really lays art open. One of the distinguishing features of art has always been that it is very difficult to defend art without referring to people's liking or enjoying it. (Functions of art such as making money or glorifying the social order are real enough, but they are rarely cited in defense of art. Let us put them aside.) When one artist shows his latest production to another, all he can usually ask is "Do you like it?" Once the "scientific" justification of art is discredited, the artist usually has to admit: If you don't like or enjoy my product, there's no reason why you should "consume" it. There are exceptions. Art sometimes becomes the sole channel for political dissent, the sole arena in which oppressive social relations can be transcended. Even so, subjectivity of value remains a feature which distinguishes art and entertainment from other activities. Thus art is historically a leisure activity. 3 But there is a fundamental contradiction here. Consider the object which one person produces for the liking, the enjoyment of another. The value of the object is supposed to be that you just like it. It supposedly has a value which is entirely subjective and entirely within you, is a part of you. Yet--the object can exist without you, is completely outside you, is not your or your valuing, and has no inherent connection with you or your valuing. The product is not personal to you. Such is the contradiction in much art and entertainment. It is unfortunate that is has to be stated so abstractly, but the discussion is about something so personal that there can be no interpersonal examples of it. Perhaps it will help to say that in appreciating or consuming art, you are always aware that it is not you, your valuing--yet your liking it, your valuing it is usually the only thing that can justify it. In art and entertainment, objects are produced having no inherent connection with people's liking, yet the artist expects the objects to find their value in people's liking them. To be totally successful, the object would have to give you an experience in which the object is as personal to you as your valuing of it. Yet you remain aware that the object is another's product, separable from your liking of it. The artist tries to "be oneself" for other people, to "express oneself" for them. 4 There are experiences for each person which accomplish what art and entertainment fail to. The purpose of this essay is to make you aware of these experiences, by comparing and contrasting them with art. I have coined the term `brend' for these experiences. Consider all of your doings, what you already do. Exclude the gratifying of physiological needs, physically harmful activities, and competitive activities. Concentrate on spontaneous self-amusement or play. That, is concentrate on everything you do because you like it, because you just like it as you do it. Actually, these doings should be referred to as your just-likings. In saying that somebody likes an art exhibit, it is appropriate to distinguish the art exhibit from his or her liking of it. But in the case of your just-likings, it is not appropriate to distinguish the objects valued from your valuings, and the single term that covers both should be used. When you write with a pencil, you are rarely attentive to the fact that the pencil was produced by somebody other than yourself. You can use something produced by somebody else without thinking about it. In your just-likings, you never notice that things are not produced by you. The essence of a just-liking is that in it, you are not aware that the object you value is less personal to you than your very valuing. These just-likings are your "brend." Some of your dreams are brend; and some children's play is brend (but formal children's games aren't). In a sense, though, the attempt to give interpersonal examples of brend is futile, because the end result is neutral things or actions, cut off from the valuing which gives them their only significance; and because the end result suggests that brend is a deliberate activity like carrying out orders. The only examples for you are your just-likings, and you have to guess them by directly applying the abstract definition. Even though brend is defined exclusively in terms of what you like, it is not necessarily solitary. The definition simply recognizes that valuing is an act of individuals; that to counterpose the likes of the community to the likes of the individuals who make it up is an ideological deception. 5 It is now possible to say that much art and entertainment are pseudo-brend; that your brend is the total originality beyond art; that your brend is the absolute self-expression and the absolute enjoyment beyond art. Can brend, then, replace art, can it expand to fill the space now occupied by art and entertainment? To ask this question is to ask when utopia will arrive, when the barrier between work and leisure will be broken down, when work will be abolished. Rather than holding out utopian promises, it is better to give whoever can grasp it the realization that the experience beyond art already occurs in his or her life--but is totally suppressed by the general repressiveness of society. Note: the avant-garde artist may raise a final question. Can't art or entertainment compensate for its impersonality by having sheer newness as a value? Can't the very foreignness of the impersonal object be entertaining? Doesn't this happen with my "Mock Risk Games," for example? The answer is that entertainmental newness is also subjective. What is entertainingly strange to one person is incomprehensible, annoying or irrelevant to another. The only difference between foreignness and other entertainment values is that brend does not have more foreignness than conventional entertainment does. As for objective newness, or the objective value of "Mock Risk Games," these issues are so difficult that I have been unable to reach final conclusions about them.