High Art and Low Art in Sam Durant’s “Porcelain Chairs” (2006)

Excerpts from the Paper

High Art and Low Art in Sam Durant’s "Porcelain Chairs" (2006)
Produced in 2006, Sam Durant’s Porcelain Chairs consists of a group of nine variously-colored life-size porcelain chairs made in the style of cheap plastic armchairs most often seen for sale in home improvement stores in the spring and summer, for when people want accessible and cheap outdoor furnishings. Like these kinds of cheap mass-produced plastic outdoor chairs, Durant’s Porcelain Chairs were also made in China; but instead of being produced in large quantities for export to the United States, these porcelain chairs were made individually by Chinese craftspeople as works of art. Durant’s chairs play on the ideas of high and low art, commercial artwork versus aesthetic...

.....o comment on and complicate the relationship between high (avant-garde) and low (kitsch) art. It seems likely that both Clement Greenberg and Andy Warhol, among others of the twentieth century, would have found the twenty-first century Porcelain Chairs to continue the conversations they started on how art should be categorized and produced in the middle of the twentieth century.
Works Cited
Durant, Sam. “Porcelain Chairs (2006),” SamDurant.com. Retrieved 1 November 2011, <http://www.samdurant.com/porcelain-chairs>
Greenberg, Clement. “
Avant
-
Garde
and Kitsch,” Originally published in Partisan Review, VI, no.5, New York, Fall 1939.
Warhol, Andy. “Interview with Gene Swenson,” Originally published in Art News, New York, November 1963.