Opinion | Down with Virgil Abloh
Say what you will about the quality of his work, but modernist artist Marcel Duchamp was, without a doubt, revolutionary. He rocked the art world of the 1910s with his ‘readymade’ sculptures, which consisted of old pieces of junk Duchamp happened to find on the street that he would then dub a ‘sculpture.’
On rare occasions, Duchamp would take two such pieces of junk and fasten them together in some way, like he did with “Bicycle Wheel,” which consisted of an upside-down bicycle wheel jammed through a bar stool.
But, more often than not, he would simply sign them and toss them in a gallery, like he did with his infamous “Fountain.” The piece consists of a urinal that Duchamp pulled out of a dump and flipped on its back. He didn’t even care to sign the object with his own name, instead scrawling “R. Mutt” in black paint on it.
Of course, Duchamp wasn’t simply putting garbage in galleries for no reason. He was forcing the world to reconsider what art was and what art could be.
It is for this reason that so many consider Duchamp such a great artist; he shattered the boundaries of high art to such an extent that now anyone could participate in its creation. Because of his works, art was no longer simply just based on craft – it could now also be based on concept.
His works were, and still remain, hugely influential. Countless artists have followed in his wake, offering their own takes on his ‘readymade’ sculptures.
In the 1950s, artists such as Louise Nevelson pushed the concepts Duchamp introduced even further with pieces like “Black Wall,” a monolithic sculpture she constructed out of manmade objects found on the streets of New York City coated in thick, black paint.
Nevelson sought to emphasize the inherent artistry in all of these objects with this work, feeling that the black paint would accentuate this quality as she suggested it “made any material look more distinguished.”
Unlike Nevelson, today’s artists do not care to innovate upon Duchamp’s once-revolutionary ideas; they’ve instead opted for apathetic regurgitation. By doing so they’ve effectively re-built the barriers Duchamp vyed to destroy with his work, once again restoring the classism and hierarchy that made high art so inaccessible to the general public in the first place.
One of the most egregious offenders is Virgil Abloh, the chief executive officer of streetwear brand Off-White and the current men’s artistic director at Louis Vuiton. A throughline in all of his work in both design and art is a jaded, self-aware hypocrisy that belittles the viewer for engaging with it.
Abloh is constantly using his gallery readymade-inspired works to condemn consumerism in American society as he did with his piece “A Dollar A Gallon III.” The piece consists of a Sunoco gas station sign soaked in bronze paint and impaled into the earth, still flashing with fluctuating prices for the station’s different types of gas.
The work is a blatant criticism of the self-destructive nature of American industry through the use of readymade imagery. It’s fine enough – albeit a bit simplistic and garish in my opinion – but when one considers Sunoco commissioned the piece, the cracks quickly begin to show.
With this context, “A Dollar A Gallon III” takes Duchamp’s once-liberating concepts and warps them into a sickly mess of pretentious irony that seems to heckle the viewer for thinking that the piece is anything more than a monument to corporate America.
Abloh seems to be taking pride in the dreadful cynicism of his work; he might as well be spitting on his audience as they try to derive meaning from this vapid, meaningless sculpture. At least it exists in public space, allowing any passerby to make what they will of the piece. The same cannot be said about the majority of his other work.
In 2017, Abloh released a series of bags with the word ‘SCULPTURE’ plastered on them in a stark, white font. With this simplistic design, Abloh implies that these bags are exactly what they say they are: sculptures in the vein of Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ manufactured to be sold.
With these bags, Abloh has effectively commodified the concept of the ‘readymade,’ plucking the once-accessible art form from its open, colloquial context and tucking it away from the public behind a $1000 barrier.
Yes, thanks to Abloh and artists like him, elitism is alive and well in the contemporary art world. Duchamp’s boundary-pushing readymade has been bastardized in the worst way possible — it has become the poster child of the very thing it sought to destroy in the 1910s.
It is exclusionary, pretentious and disgusting, and if we do not rally against it, it will not stop anytime soon.
So please do purchase another one of Abloh’s $90 t-shirts or another $1000 handbag. Keep those prices up, because god forbid the unwashed masses get their grubby mitts on this so-called ‘fine’ artwork – it might not sell for as much if its been marked with the greasy fingerprints of public engagement.
Duchamp must be rolling in his grave.