I was so sad to miss this final Lunchtime Lecture of the year! After learning about Mr. Freyer, I am very interested in the way he "creates art". I put that in italics since it is debatable whether he creates art or not, and I'm not sure what my opinion of the answer is quite yet. He calls himself a "recovering conceptual artist", which confuses me since I would still consider him a conceptual artist- I'm not sure what other category his art would fall under. It almost seems to me like he's not an artist at all; instead, he's taken a step back from being an artist and is now some kind of keeper of art, questioning what is allowed in and what isn't. While he asks big questions about what art is, I appreciates how he makes his projects more digestible by naming them plainly, like "Free Ice Water" and "All My Life for Sale". I understand that in his work he manifests meaning into ordinary objects by enriching them with conversation and consequently with meaning, but I wonder if he would consider them art if the viewers did not know the history behind the piece. Essentially, my question is asking if its enough to have faith that their must be some history behind the object, or is knowledge of the project essential. For example, from his Free Hot Supper project, would the project's meaning and content be sufficiently expressed if a viewer just saw different types of chairs surrounding a dinner table, or from his Free Ice Water project, would it be enough for the viewer to simply see the empty jar with the trinkets inside of it, not knowing that they were donated at the end of a conversation? I think this is kind of a "If nobody heard the tree fall, did it really fall" kind of question, but it made me think. I think at the end of the day I would consider his projects art, because even though I'm not involved in the process of enriching the objects with meaning, they still stimulate my mind and in a way force me to have a conversation with myself. Personally, I can't see myself creating any art of this type in the future, but I would love to take part in projects like these as a participant; it seems like a great way to gain a deeper understanding of the piece's message and also to just interact with the art community.
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