> (When I was in first grade, my class was taken to an abstract art
> exhibit that including a display of "found" art. The guide explained
> to us that an old board that had weather into attractive patterns and
> had been framed on hung on the wall was found art, and the artistic
> act was the artist spotting the board, seeing it as art, and selecting
> it to frame and present to the world as art. Probably because it was
> the first time I was exposed to the idea of deciding what was art and
> what was not, that definition stuck with me.)
In 1944 a couple of conservatives hoaxed the Australian journal Angry Penguins, pretending to be the sister of a recently dead young poet, 'Ern Malley', submitting a sequence of his poems called 'The Darkening Ecliptic'. It was basically a Sokal hoax aiming to reveal that the modernism of Angry Penguins was full of shit - they took random words and phrases from the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare, a book of quotations, and Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary. Angry Penguins excitedly commissioned a cover by Sidney Nolan and published the lot.
Angry Penguins was humiliated and didn't last much longer. But the editor, Max Harris, maintained that they were still great poems no matter what the intentions of the author, and called his next journal 'Ern Malley's Journal'. And indeed they have gone down as Australian classics. John Ashbery is a big fan. Here's the best-known one:
Durer: Innsbruck, 1495
I had often cowled in the slumbrous heavy air, Closed my inanimate lids to find it real, As I knew it would be, the colourful spires And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back, All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters – Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too. Now I find that once more I have shrunk To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream, I had read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley
Mike Beggs