Tag: found art

• Found art is the most conservation-minded of the arts, for it recycles the waste of the past and reuses it in a surprisingly different way, thereby giving the original a new lease on life. “Collage seems to me the one medium most suited to the age of conspicuous waste,” painter Harold Town wrote, “and it’s marvellous to think of the garbage of our age becoming the art of our time.”

• An especially valuable function of found art and found poetry in particular is its ability to make us respond aesthetically to the universe around us, not just to those separate parts of the world called works of art. It is possible to act as if the universe itself were an immense piece of art, a collage perhaps. But does this spell the doom of art? As the Czech poet Miroslav Holub wryly observed, “There is poetry in everything. That is the biggest argument against poetry.”