Yesterday I was looking at my friends photographs from India. While she was in toilet, I was browsing through 50 pictures and this one captured my attention:

THE SIGNIFICANT FORM

As I study now philosophy of art, I could apply the formalist theory of art and say that this picture contains the significant form. The theory is not anymore up-to-date, partly because of this vague term. But yesterday I kind of understood, what is the meaning of the significant form looking at this photograph. It`s like all the colours and things represented in the picture would be in a divine harmony. It was almost like a religious experience for me who stubbornly argue that every piece of art should have somekind of content. There isn`t now a significant meaning or interpretation at least for me in this photograph, but there is definitely a significant form.

But now we are coming to essential problem: who is the artist? I guess 99% of you would reply that my friend who took the photograph. But think about the matter in a more philosophical level, it is not at all so simple. Let me give you one example:   In 1917 Marcel Duchamp represented this piece of art to the world, the fountain.

The weird thing about this piece of art (or "piece of art" for some people) was that it was not actually made by Duchamp. It is an urinal he found. He got idea that this urinal could function also as a fountain and that`s how he gave totally new and more individual meaning to this industrial product. Fountain is one of the most classical examples of artworks under the headline "readymades". When understanding these pieces of art you need to think little bit more abstract level: the essential feature in art is not actually the material it is made from, not even who actually made it, but the creative imagination. This gives also to an audience more active role: the point about art is not the paint in a canvas but the content. An artist uses creative imagination when he paints and their audience in it`s turn when they regard their work as a piece of art. The actual artist in readymades and also in more traditional works is the one who finds the content, interpretation or significant form first. Usually it´s the artist who intentionally produces an artwork. In readymades artist is the one who finds in an normal everyday product more new and more profound point of view and puts it to the limelights. 

Let us return back again to my first official readymade. I could say my photograph is a step more radical readymade than Duchamps fountain, but more in the core than Tracey Emil´s photograph of another photograph which was already a piece of art. That is because photography is considered a way to make art itself. I`m sure that my friend at least in some level took the photograph in a concious level. But for her it was practically a picture among other hundreds of pictures she took in India. Even I was the one who had to find the picture again to attach it to my e-mail, because she didn`t remember which picture I liked. So at least according philosophy of the readymade I am the artist. When you think about further the urinal Duchamp found, of course the one who designed the urinal in the first place at least in some level used creative imagination and maybe even more than my friend. You know, industrial design is today one form of art itself.