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Anti-Anti-Art (The Spirit of What Needs to be Done

Anti-anti-art (The Spirit of what needs to be done)
A Stuckist document

The first Remodernist art group (est. 1999)


1. The Stuckists are anti-anti-art.

2. Conceptual art (and its parochial manifestation as Brit Art) is based on and justified by the art of Marcel Duchamp.

3. The art of Marcel Duchamp is not art. It is anti-art by intent and effect.

4.To justify anti-art there must be the existence of art.

5. Duchamp's work was a protest against the stale, unthinking artistic establishment of his day.

6. Today's art is anti-art.

7. Today's art is not art. Its working methodology is to think of something which is not art and to call it art. This is exactly Duchamp's ideology.

8. (Conceptualism is so called not because it generates a plethora of concepts, but because it never manages to progress beyond one single concept, namely Duchamp's original thought.)

9. The great (but wholly unintentional) irony of Post Modernism is that it is a direct equivalent of the conformist, unoriginal establishment that Duchamp attacked in the first place.

10. The principle of anti-art is meaningless in the absence of art to be anti.

11. The only viable innovation today is the true Duchampian path of anti-pretentious, self-congratulatory, claustrophobic, talentless artistic conformism, e.g. the Saatchi Gallery.

12. The Stuckists are the true inheritors of the spirit of what needs to be done.

13. Anti- anti-art is for art.



Billy Childish

Charles Thomson

11.4.2000

Published by The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry

11 Boundary Road, Chatham, Kent ME4 6TS