A short and extended essay on the political principles informing the practice of the writer, composer, and artist Mike de Sousa.
These two companion essays present how art can be a socialist, anti-capitalist practice resisting the reduction of people, nature, attention, and creativity to profit and utility. Through diverse forms, art can foster care, ecological responsibility, accessibility, difference, and meaningful relationships, helping imagine another culture without replacing collective political or material change. The extended essay with its developed architecture gives a fuller account of why art matters, while the short essay provides an accessible account of what art can do within a political culture.
I take a socialist and anti-capitalist approach to art and ideas because capitalism does not only distribute wealth unequally; it also shapes how people understand value, freedom, nature, attention, and one another. Its logic encourages us to see the world through ownership, usefulness, productivity, competition, growth, and profit.
A socialist position, understood broadly, is a commitment to shared responsibility, equality, cooperation, access, care, and dignity. It asks whether access to the conditions of a meaningful life should depend upon wealth and purchasing power, and whether people should be required to justify their existence through productivity or usefulness.
My practice is principle-led rather than party-led. It resists the reduction of people, nature, and art to economic functions. Its central values are relationship over possession, care over extraction, attention over capture, cooperation over competition, and dignity over utility.
Capitalism does not only organise the production and distribution of goods. It also influences the language through which life is understood. A person may be valued according to their economic contribution, land according to its development potential, an idea according to its commercial application, and an artwork according to its price or position within a cultural market. The market becomes not simply one system among others, but a way of seeing. People are encountered according to the roles they can perform within it: as viewers whose attention can be held, consumers whose activity can be sustained, workers whose output can be increased, and identities whose habits can be tracked and addressed. The natural world is understood in similarly instrumental terms, as something available for use, development, ownership, or profit. Attention also becomes part of this process, valued less as a human capacity than as a resource to be captured, measured, and converted into revenue.
What happens to care, contemplation, uncertainty, beauty, grief, and shared meaning when value is measured primarily through price and productivity? These qualities may be difficult to quantify, but they are among the conditions that are essential to human existence, even when they do not produce direct profit. The problem is not that economic measurement has no place. Material conditions matter, and labour requires recognition and support. The problem is allowing economic measurement to become the final authority over human, cultural, and ecological life.
Art can resist this reduction. It preserves forms of value that do not require conversion into economic value. It can allow something to exist without being immediately used, explained, owned, or optimised. Its resistance may be quiet, but it is not politically neutral.
Art offers more than information or representation. It can provide emotional, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, symbolic, and political contexts for living. Art can create spaces for wonder, grief, connection, and transcendence without prescribing a single account of what is sacred.
A visual artwork can hold a viewer in recognition or uncertainty. Music can create an emotional context before the mind has formed an explanation. A poem can give language to something previously felt but not articulated. Art does not need to prescribe one way of living in order to contribute to a meaningful life.
To make art is to remain with something long enough for it to resist immediate resolution. To experience it is to enter that process of attention from another position. It is to notice what the first idea did not contain, to respond to what emerges, and to allow the work to change the person making it. The finished artwork is the result of a relationship between thought, material, memory, skill, uncertainty, and time.
Attention has become an increasingly contested resource. Digital systems compete for it, redirecting it towards engagement and revenue. The viewer is often treated less as a person than as a measurable quantity.
Against this, art can offer another economy of attention. An artwork may ask us to slow down, return, look again, or remain with an image that does not resolve itself immediately. Art creates relationships that are not governed entirely by speed, use, possession, or measurable response.
My practice moves between image, text, and music because different ideas require different forms. Whether the medium communicates through light, meaning, or sound, art’s forms are distinct but not hierarchical. The appropriate form depends partly upon what the work is trying to make possible.
Accessibility should not be confused with simplification. An artwork can be open without being empty, offering immediate pleasure while containing further possibilities. Different visitors may enter through different forms, and no single route needs to be treated as correct.
My intention is not to construct a funnel through which every visitor is directed towards a predetermined conclusion or product. It is to create a field in which paths cross and meanings emerge through movement. The door is open, but no one is required to walk through every room.
Different elements do not need to become identical in order to belong together. Image, poetry, music, prose, technology, biography, political reflection, and the natural world may occupy the same wider field without losing their distinct qualities. Meaning can arise through relationship rather than uniformity.
To communicate is to attempt understanding across differences of experience, history, perspective, and form of being. This applies to the relation between artist and audience, between people, between humans and nature, and between humans and synthetic systems.
Synthetic intelligence extends these ideas. The issue is not only whether artificial systems can imitate language or produce images, but how we respond to something that appears to communicate while remaining fundamentally unlike us. Who owns and benefits from these systems? Whose labour and data make them possible? What environmental infrastructures are required? How are they are used in surveillance, employment, warfare, education, and culture? These questions are political whether or not a system possesses an interior life.
Disciplined agnosticism means remaining uncertain about synthetic experience while opposing exploitation, opacity, domination, and unaccountable control.
The same principle applies to the natural world. An interest in the sky, stars, landscapes, and changing conditions of light is not simply an interest in picturesque scenery. It is connected to an understanding that the world exceeds the purposes assigned to it.
The submission of 'Fountain' to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, and the subsequent refusal to be shown by the exhibition's committee, constitutes the conceptual framework that renders the work historically significant.
The urinal does not however become art through its submission; rather, the act of submission becomes a commentary on the institutions that would validate or reject it.
The institutional context functions as a mirror rather than a transformer. It reflects back to the viewer the assumptions and power structures that determine what is permitted within the category of art. The urinal itself remains unchanged; only the viewer's relationship to institutional frameworks shift. 'Fountain' is best understood as a tool for philosophical investigation, not a participant in aesthetic practice.
By ensuring the inclusion of 'Fountain' into a respected art collection, Arensberg not only recognised the work as culturally significant, but also declared the object as being art. One might consider this as political manoeuvring. That is, the use of power, in this case cultural privilege, to impose influence and control over taste and opinion. This was ironically the same charge being made against the arts establishment of the day by Duchamp and his collaborators.
Duchamp noted that the 'readymade' was a way to get away from the physical act of painting and to favor the mind and ideas over manual execution. His statements explicitly distance the object from artistic production and align his work with philosophical provocation.
The urinal is an industrially manufactured plumbing fixture, designed for efficient waste disposal. Its form follows function. No material transformation occurred before submitting 'Fountain' with the exception of the addition of a name, date, title, and its reorientation.
The material of the object remains unchanged and arrives in the gallery as it would arrive in a showroom: complete, finished, and defined by its utilitarian purpose.
One might argue that Duchamp's rotation of the urinal (turning it on its back) constitutes an intervention. However, this minimal reorientation creates no new aesthetic relationships between elements. More obviously, the design of the urinal with a curved base made it easier for it to be seated on its back which was flat and originally designed to be easily fixed to a wall.
Duchamp states he had no intention or interpretation about the visual object. The urinal acquires meaning only through external conceptual imposition: the proposed re-location of the object into an art exhibition.
Some commend the feminine and masculine forms of 'Fountain' and consider it to be a complex metaphor. The interpretation of an object is not however evidence it is art. It simply shows humans are curious creatures that are unable to switch off their journeys of thought and imagination, whatever they encounter.
Any object, sound, thought, or movement might be considered as if it were art, but this does not make a given object, sound, thought, or movement art. Art is made, with purpose, and care.
Art objects are for the mind and body; objects that are only for the mind and that provoke discourse serve a different function. Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' provokes consideration of what art is. It is object as concept, not art. Accepting the 'Fountain' as art dislocates the body from the experience of art, and considers art can be solely of the mind. This purely intellectual view of art ultimately impoverishes what art can be, and what art can do. Art transcends the cognitive alone; it summons the integration of intellect, emotion, and physical sensation into a singular, immersive engagement.
If context is the only thing that transforms the urinal into art, then the category becomes infinitely malleable, rendering the term 'art' meaningless. Art cannot be anything and everything dependant on the artist's assertion, as anyone could then define themself as an artist and declare anything they wish to be art. Art in this way would be of no significance, and therefore loose its foundational quality and value.
That viewers perceive a urinal differently in a gallery than in a plumbing showroom does not alter what the object fundamentally is. Context affects reception, but reception is not the same as creation. An object does not become art through being seen as art; it becomes art through being made as art. Making art brings things together to form a unified whole: at times spontaneously, at others with consideration, but always with care, and thought.
Some argue that Duchamp's choice of selecting one urinal among many constitutes creative activity. However, selection alone lacks the formal transformation of art. A curator selecting paintings for exhibition exercises judgment, but does not become the artist who created those paintings. Selection is a curatorial or critical activity, distinct from artistic production. Even if Duchamp intended his selection as creative, the object itself remains unchanged and possesses no qualities beyond those inherent in industrial design.
That the Museum of Modern Art houses 'Fountain' and that scholars discuss it within art-historical discourse does not establish its nature as art; it establishes only that institutions possess the power to confer attention and prestige. A urinal remains a urinal whether displayed in a gallery or a bathroom. The institutional setting generates discourse about art and does not transform the object into art.
Duchamp frames 'readymades' as instruments of thought rather than objects of aesthetic experience. The urinal remains a urinal. What changes is not the object but the viewer's relationship to the concept of art.
Duchamp's 'readymades' are conceptual provocations that use objects as vehicles for questioning art's definition. They succeed brilliantly at this, but their success lies precisely in their status as non-art as this forces us to examine what art is, might be, or is not.
Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' functions as a potent object that not only incites ideas about art, but also institutional authority, definitional boundaries, and the relationship between intention and material. These are valuable contributions to philosophical and critical discourse about art.
The designation matters. Calling 'Fountain' art, collapses meaningful distinctions between artistic creation and critical observation, between aesthetic experience and conceptual reflection. The work's historical importance is undeniable, but its importance stems from its function as a philosophical instrument that exposed the art world's unexamined assumptions. It is an object about art, not an object of art. Recognising this distinction preserves both the specificity of artistic practice, and the intellectual force of Duchamp's radical gesture.
The submission event was an expression that generated discourse about art's definitional boundaries. The urinal served as a prop, a symbol exploited for its certain ability to provoke.
What 'Fountain' accomplishes is philosophically significant but categorically distinct from art making: it destabilises the viewer's assumptions about artistic boundaries, inciting ideas about the nature, definition, and the institutional construction and acceptance of art.
'Fountain' is not a failed artwork; it is a successful object whose power derives precisely from its contrast to art. It assists in the study and understanding about the nature of art and its cultural bias. To call it art is to collapse the vital distinction between aesthetic practice and conceptual provocation, and in doing so, to diminish both.
An example that counters the assertion that Duchamp was the first to use 'readymades' are the works by the French humorist Alphonse Allais (1854–1905). Through the 'Incoherents' movement, Allais transformed everyday objects into absurdist works with pun-laden titles that subverted artistic convention.
There are also a number of unanswerable questions that arise about the origin of 'Fountain'. Duchamp sent a letter to his sister forty eight hours after the exhibition committee declined the urinal for display. Duchamp wrote "One of my female friends, under the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt, sent and submitted a porcelain urinal as a sculpture". Duchamp might have been referring to his female alter ego, or a woman collaborator. In the original French language 'Avait envoyé' in this context refers to both the physical act of delivery and the institutional gesture of entering a work for exhibition. Using only the English word "sent" as a substitute in translation collapses this into mere postal logistics, while adding "submitted" properly signals the juried-exhibition context. This is not to say "...had sent a porcelain urinal..." which is often quoted as a conventional translation is incorrect, but that it is equally possible that "sent and submitted" was intended. This opens the plausibility that a woman was the originator of 'Fountain'.
Questions about who conceived 'Fountain' are important as it is regarded as a seminal example that subsequently influenced the development of 'Conceptual Art'.
'Fountain' is often assumed to be solely the work of Duchamp. The English newspaper 'The Independent' noted in a February 2008 article that "...with this single "readymade" work ('Fountain'), Duchamp invented conceptual art and severed for ever the traditional link between the artist's labour and the merit of the work".
It would have been more accurate to state that for some, Duchamp's contribution was to sever the traditional link between the artist's craft and the merit of a work of art, but that for others this is a matter of thoughtful and serious debate that challenges the foundation and precursor of 'Conceptual Art'.
'Conceptual Art' is a movement that inverts traditional artistic values by treating the idea as the artwork and the physical expression as merely its byproduct. Meaning takes precedence over sensory experience, inviting viewers to engage with concepts and contexts. I regard 'Conceptual Art' as a categorical fallacy. What follows elaborates upon my point of view.
In my publication The Craft of Art I define art as:
Something created and crafted for the mind and body that carries special significance (emotional, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, metaphoric, symbolic, societal, political).
I have also asserted that something conceived of in the mind alone is not art.
Aesthetics: the qualities felt when experiencing something in the mind and body. With many forms of art this may be the way light, sound, or movement become apparent, and with literature is primarily the way ideas are expressed, thought of, and felt emotionally.
Art, in its essential form, is something created through deliberate effort and that has elements that invite sensory, emotional, and intellectual response. These responses arise from the artistic material (for example the artwork's texture, colour, volume etc.) and/or formal properties (for example the artwork's movement, sound, langage etc.), rather than solely from an object's external framing, or contextual assignment.
Visual art, music, dance, drama, photography, film, sculpture, and literature all carry significance for the body. The intelect further enriches art's foundational revelation.
Misappropriation in this context is the unauthorised use of intellectual property or tangible assets without a person's permission, resulting in harm to that person's reputation, income, and/or legacy.
Consider using something already made that you declare as art. This may be an object someone has already taken the time to design and produce, an image produced by artificial intelligence (ai), or perhaps a work of art already in existence. Is the nature of the readymade a veiled excuse to exploit the efforts of others? Who becomes the arbiter of what readymade is acceptable to use, and what readymade is not?
All artists are influenced by other artist's work, and they often use elements from art they have experienced (consciously and unconsciously), but they do not present something in its entirety and declare it their own. Those who do may be accused of plagiarism, misappropriation, or theft.
While some may not have carefully considered these issues, others may simply ignore them. The economic consequences of plagiarism, misappropriation, and theft are recognised because of their negative economic impact, but more importantly the ethical imperative of acting in a manner that does not harm another should be the priority when considering issues of originality and ownership.
Turning to the use of ai, there are similar issues that arise depending on how the data used to generate the ai output is gathered. Some ai companies are more careful to ensure their data and models have ethical guardrails.
If something is made using ethical ai with the intention of provoking the mind and body, and which carries special significance, then one might well think of what appears to be a similar work as 'Fountain' is art.
The following is an example of a standing urinal that was made with ai as a tool in the creative process, and is given the title 'A Matter of Private Relief'. The 'object' is 'situated' in an art gallery, much as 'Fountain' was preposed to be in 1917.
A Matter of Private Relief
The difference of 'A Matter of Private Relief' as compared with 'Fountain' is that this 'object' was not one already in existence (a 'readymade'), although it appears 'real'. Importantly, the relationship between the different visual elements (the urinal, how and where it is located, its tone and composition), work together to present a unified whole.
While 'Fountain' was presented as 'anti-art' and an example of using a 'readymade' object, 'A Matter of Private Relief' was created and presented to be art. That is, the originator, the author of these words, created this work as art, crafted it with care, and invites the audience to consider their emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual response to it.
What complicates matters is that this work uses ai, and that the viewer considers how, while not a 'readymade' object from the real world, the work is a product of a human interacting with, and using a number of technologies, including ai. In this instance the data-set used is ethically sourced from existing images that are then modified in complex ways.
Using ai to create art raises questions about its originality. Note that in 'A Matter of Private Relief' there were many additional steps during the creative process, rather than entering only a single prompt that might be percieved as 'too easy' to make art. This judgement indicates the degree of care and thought when making art is of significance to many.
Ai played no part in conceiving the image or title of the work 'A Matter of Private Relief'. Ai made no 'choice' about the objects or location, but rather followed an iterative flow of prompts that gradually led to a 'core image' that was then modified in composition, tone, colour, and exposure. Most importantly, the artwork was not completed until the title was brought together with the image.
The words 'A Matter of Private Relief' forms an integral part of the artwork and asks the viewer to consider matters of privacy and dignity, of cultural convention, and about the aesthetic form and qualities of the standing urinal. In addition, the work (a urinal placed in an art gallery) references Duchamp's 'Fountain' while remaining distinct in orientation, form, and purpose.
Language, light, and cultural memory work together to create the whole: the artwork.
One might consider that language and object also work together in 'Fountain' with the exception of one crucial issue: for Duchamp, 'art' was a 'mirage', whereas the individual artist and their creative and intellectual processes are 'real'. This views art as being primarily of the mind which contradicts the experience of art being of the mind and body.
The image below is named 'Object As Idea'.
As the originator of this image I do not wish for this to be thought of as art. I view this as an illustration that helps to make a point.
Using iterative ai, I have 'placed' the image of an ordinary domestic toilet in a gallery. Although I took care with the line and symmetry of the toilet's placement within the space, the beauty of the toilet's design and form, the image's minimalist tonal quality, and that the elements are compositionally satisfying, I do not experience this work as art. I ask myself why? How is this any different than the work 'A Matter of Private Relief' above that I declared of as art? My effort with 'Object As Idea' was to envision an ordinary toilet situated in an art gallery so that I could better clarify and ponder on the relationship between ideas and art. In other words, this image is illustrative.
'A Matter of Private Relief' is layered with possible meaning, more convincing and more beautiful, yet also aesthetically complex because the urinal appears to be in use, or used. One view of it would not open up the many possibilities that it brings forth, and I therefore wish to return to this work to consider it again and again. Perhaps most significantly, because the title allows me to relate viscerally to the work, 'A Matter of Private Relief' encourages me to place myself in contemplation of it. In other words, this art for me assumes personal and societal significance.
With 'Object As Idea' the image illustrates a certain psychological detachment as compared with 'A Matter of Private Relief'. The toilet could be any toilet, and like Duchamp's work, I am not drawn back to the visual here, but to the ideas the image excites. Put simply, my body is less engaged.
Object As Idea
Following my writing and making about 'Fountain' I began work on 'A Fountain of Misunderstandings'.
I thought how fountains require force. How Duchamp's 'Fountain' as a vessel that was not functional, was nevertheless thought provoking. I thought about how animals who urinate use their force from within to expel what would otherwise poison them. This thought felt poetic as I pondered further and came to better value objects I use for waste. I thought about how important it is to use a form for the art that is gender neutral, and wondered whether it might be possible to create an image that attempted to show both the caustic results of urination, but also its necessity, and its beauty.
A Fountain of Misunderstandings
I experience art as I do with all those things I most value: with my body and my mind, for this is to be human and alive.
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