PART THREE

FORGING A NEW ART

I.

In the first few months of 1963, the Mona Lisa was seen by nearly two million people in New York and Washington, D.C. Shipped to the United States on a diplomatic mission—escorted by the French culture minister and received by President John F. Kennedy—the painting did little to assuage Franco-American tension about NATO and nuclear proliferation, but the visit certified Lisa del Giocondo’s status as the smiling face of high art, as iconic as any modern movie star.

Several months earlier, an up-and-coming Pop artist named Andy Warhol, notorious for painting consumer goods, turned his attention to celebrities, including Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Instead of painting their portraits by hand, he adapted a technique from commercial printing, in which a photographic image could be transferred to canvas by pushing paint through a mechanically produced silk-screen template. Any photo could be replicated, including those in newspapers, favorite sources for Warhol since they reinforced the relationship of his paintings to mass media. The newspapers might even give him ideas, suggesting popular subjects. And in the winter of 1963, few subjects were more popular than the touring Mona Lisa.

Nobody would mistake Warhol’s Mona Lisas for the Renaissance original. Leonardo da Vinci finessed La Gioconda’s visage with multiple layers of translucent pigment, applied over months with fine sable-hair brushes. Warhol could produce her likeness in mere minutes, a silhouette instantly recognizable as a smear of black paint. He made multiple versions in various sizes. Several were diptychs. His most ambitious was a five-by-six grid called Thirty Are Better Than One.

The title was as sly as his painting was cunning. Thirty are better than one, at least in Warhol’s handling of Leonardo’s portrait. Recognizing that the Mona Lisa had become a celebrity akin to Marilyn Monroe, he proposed that fame was a commodity and that the endless replication of a celebrity’s face made it so. His industrial process mimicked the mechanism by which people become products, and the end result revealed the degree to which consumers are active participants, mentally filling in enough details to identify Warhol’s raw silk screen with Leonardo’s sfumato portrait. In Thirty Are Better Than One, the Mona Lisa is reduced to a pattern, like paisley or toile de Jouy: perfectly flat, potentially infinite.

Warhol gave Marilyn Monroe the same treatment, screening her face repeatedly from edge to edge of his canvas, yet his repetitions of the Mona Lisa were the most provocative expression of his disquieting vision. Unlike Monroe, whose messy life was extensively chronicled, Lisa del Giocondo was known only by her appearance. A single image was the entire basis of her fame. All surface, no substance, the Mona Lisa was the model celebrity—and an ideal model for deconstructing celebrity in the 1960s.

In art historical terms, Warhol’s copies fall under the category of appropriation, a subgenre as old as the 20th century, in which legitimate artists technically come closest to forgery. Though not produced under false pretenses, works of appropriation art are fundamentally derivative. Like forgeries, they trade on borrowed status. Their significance emanates from an absent original. ¹

In other words, appropriation artists appropriate the forger’s modus operandi for artistic purposes. And almost always, as in the case of Warhol, those purposes are subversive. Appropriation is a form of critique, a mode of questioning. Yet Warhol was nearly unique in his ability to question more than merely the work he appropriated.

Thirty Are Better Than One is not really about the Mona Lisa or even about art, but rather concerns the tortuous relationship between culture and media, a relationship beginning to play out in his own life as he became the first metacelebrity. In a sense, the Mona Lisas and Marilyns and all the paintings that followed were mere props in that lifelong performance, just as counterfeited canvases are only the physical manifestation of a forger’s swindle. Fame was Warhol’s true medium, which he subverted by insisting that he was just like everybody else. “I think it would be so great if more people took up silkscreens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or someone else’s,” he said in a November 1963 ARTnews interview. And by 1968, he was predicting a future in which everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, a nightmare hybrid of democracy and individualism he personally set out to realize by casting anyone he met, regardless of talent, in his unscripted movies. Like the greatest of conmen, Warhol manipulated people’s desires and beliefs, but unlike Elmyr de Hory or Han van Meegeren, he did it all out in the open, for everyone to see.

1. Appropriation should be distinguished from even the strongest cases of artistic influence. Though Édouard Manet’s Olympia was obviously inspired by Titian’s Venus of Urbano, and his substitution of a prostitute for a goddess is clearly meaningful, his reference was to the content of Titian’s famous painting, achieved by echoing the composition. He provocatively inserted his Olympia into a tradition including not only the Venus of Urbano but also Giorgione’s earlier Sleeping Venus. His painting turns on that tradition, rather than being a painting about a painting.

Warhol proved that legitimate art could be as powerful as the counterfeit. He showed the extent to which the forger’s art can be appropriated, the mantle of anxiety reclaimed. Yet his achievement also exposes the opportunities squandered by other serious artists, who could potentially have gamed the system but never even tried, preferring instead to produce angst-ridden baubles to be risklessly ogled in museums.

Art has a lot to learn from forgery. If artistic activity online and in the street are any indication, radical contemporary artists perceive the failings of previous generations. Some are attempting to make up for past indolence. One of the most notorious, known only by the pseudonym Banksy, has puckishly taken up where Warhol left off. “In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes,” he wrote in 2006—spraypainting the words on an obsolete TV set—while tauntingly keeping his identity masked.

To this day, Banksy remains known only by his exploits, including his own Mona Lisa appropriation, La Gioconda wearing a yellow smiley face: centuries of Western art distilled to a perfect cliché. In 2004, Banksy smuggled his painting into the Louvre, illicitly attaching it to the wall with double-sided tape. Within minutes it was found and hustled from view by museum staff. However, the anxieties it elicited cannot so easily be effaced. Where does culture belong? What can art ex press?

II.

In the fall of 1919, nearly half a century before Andy Warhol made his Mona Lisa silk screens, Marcel Duchamp bought a postcard photograph of La Gioconda from a Parisian street vendor on the rue de Rivoli. Adding a beard and mustache as well as his own signature, he brought the card to New York as a gift for his patron Walter Arensberg, one of the first people in the world to appreciate the readymade, his revolutionary new art form.

Duchamp had begun producing readymades in 1913—a year after he painted his notorious Nude Descending a Staircase—when he had the “happy idea” of attaching a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. His delight in this undisguised combination of common objects led him to more outlandish productions, most famously an upturned urinal that he signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit in Manhattan. Simply titled Fountain, the work was rejected, despite the fact that the show was unjuried and open to anyone who paid a $6 entry fee. In retaliation, Duchamp and a couple of collaborators published an unsigned editorial in a little magazine called The Blind Man. “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance,” they wrote. “He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”

Fountain redefined art, rejecting craftsmanship and sanctifying curation. The artist’s job, as envisioned by Duchamp, was to provide a context in which an object functioned as an idea. And the idea of Fountain was to enact that redefinition.

Duchamp purposely constrained his selection of readymades, recognizing that the limiting factor was viewers’ attention. In that respect, Fountain was an ideal choice. Even the word urinal was considered indecent in 1917; public display of the porcelain bathroom fixture would have been nearly pornographic. ² Choosing the Mona Lisa was also impertinent, especially given the means by which he “rectified” this readymade: In addition to the roughly drawn mustache and beard, he captioned the postcard with the letters L.H.O.O.Q., which can be phonetically read as elle a chaud au cul, French slang for “she has a hot ass.” The vulgarity was juvenile but not gratuitous. Defiling La Gioconda, Duchamp desanctified Leonardo’s masterpiece in order to resanctify it as his own. He finished the thought first broached by Fountain, that authorship was entirely a matter of proclamation and that even the most famous of images could be appropriated as a new artwork because the act of appropriating it would give it new meaning.

If Fountain challenged the conventional notion of art, L.H.O.O.Q. questioned the nature of creativity. And almost immediately, the opportunity suggested by Duchamp was seized by his friend Francis Picabia, who decided to print the rectified readymade in his journal 391. Since 391 was printed in Paris, and Duchamp and his postcard were already in New York, Picabia simply bought another reproduction of La Gioconda and drew in the mustache himself. He forgot the goatee. “That made the difference,” Duchamp told the art historian Pierre Cabanne in a 1966 interview, but the greater distinction was in the captioning. Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp, Picabia called it, appropriating Duchamp’s appropriation (and also Duchamp’s name) for the antiart crusade that Dada represented.

2. Given that Duchamp was a cofounder of the Society of Independent Artists and knew the other personalities involved, he must have anticipated the hostile reception his pseudonymous submission would receive and even hoped for the rejection. Exclusion from the context of exhibition contributed to the context of rebellion.

As antiart, L.H.O.O.Q. made a strong statement—visualizing the nihilist defeat of civilization—but Duchamp was no Dadaist. His readymades upset tradition to find a way forward. The way he found was so open-ended that his readymade art could be readily remade to support any message, even those he might be inclined to oppose.

That open-endedness has made Duchamp irresistible to artists ever since. His influence is ubiquitous, evident in Surrealist objects such as Salvador Dali’s lobster telephone and Pop paintings from Warhol’s soup cans to Jasper Johns’s American flags. “He has changed the condition of being here,” Johns wrote in a posthumous appreciation. For the appropriation artist, he might even be said to have created those conditions.

III.

In 1964, as Andy Warhol turned his attention from the Mona Lisa to Day-Glo hibiscus flowers, a young artist named Elaine Sturtevant asked to borrow some of his silk-screen templates so that she could take up his process and make paintings identical to his. Warhol was happy to oblige.

Sturtevant had her first solo show the following year. At the Bianchini Gallery in Manhattan, she exhibited several Flowers remakes, as well as her reiterations of paintings by artists including Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. All were remarkably similar to the originals; in each case, she’d carefully reenacted the painter’s method of working. “Ask Elaine,” Warhol would say whenever art historians pestered him with technical questions.

3. Not everybody was so generous. In the same year, Warhol himself was sued for copyright infringement by the photographer Patricia Caulfield, whose magazine picture of hibiscus flowers he’d blown up and recolored in his silk screens. Though her case was tenuous, given how completely he transformed the image, he chose to settle out of court with a cash payment. He had no interest in interrogating intellectual property law and, whenever possible, made future silk screens from his own photos.

Sturtevant’s appropriations were taken in stride by critics, who regarded her as more Pop than the Pop artists she mimicked. She objected to their assessment, arguing that Pop dealt only with surfaces. “I started asking questions about what lay beneath the surface,” she claimed. “What is the understructure of art?”

The postmodern art critic Douglas Crimp was similarly motivated in 1977, when he curated Pictures at Artists Space in Manhattan, the first exhibition to explicitly present appropriation art as a movement. “Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification,” he wrote in the journal October. “Underneath each picture there is always another picture.”

At Artists Space, Crimp’s position was most clearly illustrated in the work of Troy Brauntuch, who reproduced a group of banal architectural sketches originally drawn by the failed-artist-turnedFührer Adolf Hitler. The images’ power was wholly on account of the absent author: Brauntuch revealed how much the understructure of art could conceal. Yet the Pictures artist who was most inspired by the exhibition and who most exhaustively examined the implications of appropriation was Sherrie Levine.

In 1979, Levine rephotographed a couple of dozen photographs originally taken by Walker Evans in 1936. Documenting a family of sharecroppers in rural Alabama, the images were some of Evans’s most widely recognized pictures, first published in the 1941 best seller Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reproduced again in the 1978 book First and Last. Levine’s pictures were photographs of pages from the 1978 catalogue. The only thing that distinguished them from Evans’s originals was that she retitled them After Walker Evans.

4. Sturtevant made these comments to the painter Peter Halley in a September 2005 Index Magazine interview, sounding the same argument she had been making for four decades. During that time, she never stopped appropriating.

Since the rephotography was completely mechanical, her entire creative role was the act of appropriation. “The work is in a dialectical relationship to the notion of originality,” she told Arts Magazine in 1985. “A picture of a picture is a strange thing and it brings up lots of contradictions.”

Levine concurrently pursued contradictions in other media. For a 1985 Hunter College exhibition on the theme of repetition, she redrew a drawing by the Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich, copying it six times with such precision that each of her derivative originals could not be distinguished from the others. In 1991, she began casting urinals in bronze—the preferred material of high art—and setting them on pedestals with titles such as Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp).

Again and again, Sherrie Levine has entered into dialectics with art of the past, questioning conventional assumptions about originality and creativity and interrogating the meaning of art. Often subtle, always smart, they elaborate Duchampian riddles more imaginatively than the work of Brauntuch or Sturtevant. Yet ultimately they fall into the same rut.

Duchamp made art about art to question what art was about. Even in 1917, a decade after the advent of Cubism, art was severely constrained by tradition, which limited the creative potential of artists. Fountain represented a mode of creation that had never even been considered in academies, alerting artists to strategies they’d not conceived before and exposing audiences to unorthodox artistic practices. Readymades were instruments of freedom, and to a remarkable degree, they emancipated artists and liberated institutions. By the 1960s, an artwork could be an environment, a happening, or even a concept. Yet all too often, the environment, happening, or concept would be about art.⁵This avant-garde tendency to ponder and parse what it means to be free, rather than acting on that freedom in any new way, is ubiquitous. Appropriation is the epitome.

In 2001, an artist named Michael Mandiberg launched the Web site AfterSherrieLevine.com, offering downloadable digital scans of After Walker Evans, together with printable certificates of authenticity. “A lot of conceptual art is an inside joke, and a lot of these jokes are one-liners,” he confessed in an artist’s statement. “This site (like Sherrie Levine’s work itself) is no different.” Art about art spawns art about art about art. The readymade has liberated artists to incarcerate themselves in their own hall of mirrors.

The realm of self-reflexive art is an insular space, comfortably detached from broader society. Both artists and society may appreciate that safety, but it denies everyone the subversive function that art ought to have in our culture. The readymade has been counterproductive.

“Duchamp is not viable,” Sturtevant admitted to the critic Hans Ulrich Obrist in a 2008 interview for the journal 032c, and Levine’s Fountain embodies that disillusionment in a physical object: The most radical artwork of the century is cast as just another bronze statue: not a rupture with the past but a bona fide piece of art history.

5. At its best, the game could at least be played with a sense of irony. For instance, in 1971, John Baldessari made a half-hour video of himself writing the words “I will not make any more boring art” over and over again. More typical is Joseph Beuys’s 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, in which he walked around a locked gallery with a dead hare on his arm and whispered into its ear while standing in front of assorted artworks. “The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination,” he later informed his acolytes with stultifying seriousness. “Even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality.”

Publicly withdrawing from art to play chess in the 1920s, Duchamp may have been tacitly acknowledging the readymade stalemate. Or his retirement—which was hardly permanent—can be read as a new gambit. To rejuvenate art, people had to stop behaving like artists.

I V.

The Bank of England didn’t believe that J. S. G. Boggs was behaving like an artist when they learned that he was making money. On October 31, 1986, three inspectors from Scotland Yard raided an exhibition of his currency at the Young Unknowns Gallery in London and placed him under arrest. Though his banknotes were drawn by hand, bearing his own signature as chief cashier, the British government pressed charges under Section 18 of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act, threatening to end his career with a forty-year prison sentence.

Eventually, Boggs was acquitted. His lawyers persuaded the jury that even “a moron in a hurry” would never mistake his drawings for pounds sterling. In truth, the threat posed by his art had nothing to do with counterfeiting. If the Bank of England had reason to be anxious, it was because people knowingly accepted Boggs bills in lieu of banknotes.

Boggs’s project began with a simple exchange. At a Chicago diner one day, he ordered a doughnut and coffee. On his napkin, he distractedly wrote the number one, gradually embellishing it until he found himself looking at an abstract $1 bill. The waitress noticed, too, and liked it so much she wanted to buy it. Instead of selling it, he offered it in exchange for his 90¢ snack. She accepted, and as he got up to leave, she gave him a dime in change.

That became the model for every transaction that followed. Wherever Boggs was, he drew the local currency by hand, and whenever he wanted to buy something, he offered his drawing at face value. In this way, he paid for food and clothing and transportation. However, he would not retail drawings to collectors. If collectors wanted to buy, he’d sell them the change and receipt from a transaction, leaving them to locate his drawing and negotiate with the merchant who’d accepted it instead of cash. In that way, he created an alternate economy based on an equivalence between money and art: the inherent uselessness of both that makes the value of each arbitrary.

This correspondence could easily have been tendered as a critique of the art market, and it had been in the past. For instance, in the early 1970s, the conceptual artist Ed Kienholz stenciled ever-increasing sums of money on sheets of paper, each of which he sold successively for the indicated amount, starting at $1 and eventually reaching $10,000. What makes Boggs so compelling is that he reversed the equation. He doesn’t tell us that art is absurd but breaks out of the museum-gallery complex, leveraging the absurdity of art to question the sanity of finance.

Ditching the museum-gallery complex has boundless advantages, most conspicuously exploited by street artists such as Banksy. ⁶ The bane of law-and-order fanatics, their misbehavior blasts through barriers of money and power, even when those partitions cannot literally be breached: On a concrete wall built by Israeli security to blockade Palestinian territory, Banksy has illicitly stenciled pictures of small girls frisking armed soldiers and of masked insurgents hurling bouquets of flowers. Violating military regulations to spread messages of peace in a universal visual language, Banksy animates painting as both image and action.

6. Not that street artists ditch the establishment completely. All too many (including Banksy) ape their own graffiti in innocuous paintings and prints retailed by galleries on the basis of street cred.

Art behaves in unexpected ways when accepted practices are abandoned. When Shepard Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1980s, a friend asked him how to make a stencil. To demonstrate, he tore a promotional photo of professional wrestler Andre the Giant from a newspaper, sliced away background and shadows with an X-Acto, and teasingly added the line “Andre the Giant Has a Posse,” before using the stencil to make stickers that he pasted up around town. Within days, Fairey overheard people speculating about the message. Was the posse a skate-punk group? A political movement? A cult? The irreducible ambiguity left all options open. A vast diversity of people gravitated toward the image, identified with it, and started making their own stencils and posters of Andre.

Over the next couple of decades, image and message were simplified into a blunt black-and-white icon of a brutal face with the words Obey Giant emblazoned beneath. Those modifications, wrought by consensus without any organization, have rendered the project more ominous with time, enlarging and entrenching the giant’s sphere of influence. Whenever Los Angeles or Berlin or Tokyo is hit, spectators and participants alike are impelled to assign meaning to a campaign without any purpose except selfsustenance.

The power of street art, like forgery, is that it cannot be avoided. Spraypaint puts self-expression in the hands of the disenfranchised, who overwrite their neighborhoods with their own text and images. Wheat paste tweaks company billboards into anticorporate agitprop. (An Apple ad is defaced to make the “Think Different” tagline next to a photo of the Dalai Lama read “Think Disillusioned.”) All of this activity provokes pertinent questions: Who owns a city’s visual space, the corporations who can buy it or the public who lives in it? How can the space be disrupted to make us less complacent?

The operational strategy of street art, where social structures are challenged on their own turf, is often referred to as culture jamming. ⁷ And as our culture has increasingly moved online, jamming has increasingly followed suit.

One of the first such hacks was perpetrated on December 10, 1998, when the net artists Franco and Eva Mattes launched www. vaticano.org, a near-perfect double of the official Vatican Web site. The fake online Vatican thrived because few people knew that the Vatican had its own top-level domain—www.vatican.va —and search engines amplified people’s mistake. As a result, untold thousands browsed papal encyclicals that had been lightly modified to promote free sex and drug legalization. Hundreds took advantage of the special offer to have their sins absolved by e-mail.

Franco and Eva Mattes have distinguished their work from appropriation art by referring to it as attribution art, a term that aptly aligns them more closely with forgers such as Tom Keating than with straight artists such as Sherrie Levine. At least initially, such work depends on anonymity. On first viewing, Vaticano.org was essentially utopian, subversively foisting a new-and-improved vision of Catholicism on believers, so that the true encyclicals would seem untenably old-fashioned. Then the fraud was revealed, challenging authority from the opposite direction by eroding the credibility of all papal dogma, including proclamations on the official Web site. (Might vatican.va also be a spoof?) Vaticano.org is a hack on faith.

7. It may be tempting to see culture jamming as a sort of latter-day Situationism. Like the Situationists in mid-century France, contemporary street artists eschew institutionalized spectacle to confront people directly, and much of their work is politically motivated. However, the Situationist International was a movement—built on theoretical precepts and organized with party discipline—whereas graffiti is a sort of folk art, and street artists are anarchic. Situationism was a political tactic. Culture jamming is an emergent phenomenon. For that reason, culture jamming is far more resilient and far more suited to artistic practice.

8. The more traffic that search engines directed to the site, the more credible the site appeared to search engine algorithms, which directed more traffic to the site, ad infinitum.

This double action of fantasy and disillusionment has been used often in net art and has proven resilient. For instance, in 2011 the new media artists Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev invented a gadget that allows them to hijack the Wi-Fi signal in a library or Internet cafe and to remotely edit the content of news sites such as nytimes.com so that anyone in the room browsing the New York Times on a wireless device sees modified headlines. Since the hack is strictly local, the news sites are never aware of the override. And since the appliance is open-source—with blueprints freely provided online—there’s a chance the news has been hacked at any hotspot worldwide.

Oliver and Vasiliev dubbed their work Newstweek and on the project Web site describe it as “a tactical device for altering reality on a per-network basis.” Like the modifications to the Vatican Web site, their alterations often take the form of wishful thinking. (In one case, they had Wikileaks founder Julian Assange being nominated U.S. Secretary of Defense.) But the differences between Newstweek and the Mattes’s attribution art are as significant as the similarities. Here the content is decidedly secondary to the concept. The undercurrent of anxiety derives from the fact that the hack is not isolated—unlike Vaticano.org—and responsibility cannot be traced to any single source.

Newstweek is the reductio ad absurdum version of citizen journalism, in which everyone is an autonomous news organization. It’s an uncontrolled experiment in the democratization of information, in which anyone can potentially be a participant, voluntarily or not.

Precisely where the art resides, and who are the artists, are questions without definitive answers in the case of Newstweek, especially since the open-source plans allow anyone to modify everything, from the headlines to the capabilities of the device. In that respect, Newstweek is the online analogue of Obey Giant. All that can be said of such projects is that they disrupt the status quo for no purpose other than to question it. To appropriate a term from Immanuel Kant, they are animated by Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck—purposeful purposelessness.

V.

Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck is a perfect description of art. Purposeful purposelessness is appealingly broad, encompassing activities that aren’t conventionally artistic, such as the chess matches favored by Marcel Duchamp. Yet Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck is also informatively narrow. Art forgery is not purposeless. ⁹

That is why forgers cannot ultimately replace artists, even if their work has been superior to what artists have done in the past. Art must take up the forger’s means without the forger’s goals, to work on the far side of legitimacy without the limitation of making a point or a buck.

9. Much of the most radical contemporary art fails for the same reason. In 2009, for instance, the artists’ collective Futurefarmers was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to teach families to plant crops in the wasted spaces around their homes. There was genuine value in helping people plant their land with potatoes, fava beans, and bok choy, but labeling the practice art in no way changed the meaning or effect. The fact that anything can be categorized as art does not make everything artistically interesting.

The far side of legitimacy is not necessarily illicit. To act on our anxieties, art must break mores. In some cases, those mores may be enforced by law, yet the full range of human behavior is beyond the imagination of legislators and judges, whose work is essentially reactive. Artists can experiment with possibilities outside our current reality.

Given the unlimited potential of experimentation, it comes as no surprise that the strongest provocations in the 21st century take the form of pure research, more often associated with the sciences. Artists such as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the collective SymbioticA work in a fully equipped laboratory, where they have grown frog steaks in petri dishes using standard tissue-culturing techniques. Their Disembodied Cuisine paralleled research by NASA—where scientists were investigating protein sources for long-term space flight—but broke rank with staid scientific protocol in 2003, when Catts cooked and served his lab-grown steak at a dinner party. The frog from which the muscle cells had been cultured was still alive and present to witness the feast. The distinction between life and death has never seemed more tenuous.

And yet more incendiary permutations on Disembodied Cuisine—such as disembodied cannibalism—might roil society at any time. Like the coding behind Newstweek, SymbioticA’s methods are all open-source and actively spread through workshops led by Catts and Zurr.

A salient feature of experimentation, this free license to replay and remix is central to the scientific method. Yet in professional scientific circles, the potential to profit from spin-off technologies encourages secrecy and intellectual property protection. The open exchange of ideas has been rebranded as piracy. To the extent that enlightenment principles are the ideals of science, artists such as Catts and Zurr act more scientifically than scientists.

One especially guarded realm of scientific research is genetics, which can inspire lucrative pharmaceuticals, food crops, and even flowers. In 1992, the Australian company Florigene patented a sequence of petunia DNA that could be implanted in carnations and roses to make them blue. These genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were greenhouse-cloned and sold to florists precut, ensuring that the Florigene holding company Suntory was the only source of the vastly popular flowers for nearly two decades. Then in 2009, the artists Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel tested the premises of this scientific monopoly. They reverse- engineered the plants and released blue carnation seed into the wild.

As Fukuhara noted on the artists’ Web site, they were giving the plants a “chance of sexual reproduction” denied to them by Suntory. Living this wild new life, the flowers infringed on Suntory’s intellectual property by making countless unauthorized copies of their patented DNA. The pirated flowers became pirates in their own right just by attempting to live a natural life. Nonmodified carnations were potentially also implicated by cross-pollination. The intellectual property protection of life was put to the test by the disobedience of flowers.

When Fukuhara and Tremmel exhibited their reverse-engineered carnations at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, local officials required that the plants be locked behind bulletproof glass, under constant surveillance by security guards. The precaution had nothing to do with patent law and everything to do with anxiety about GMOs that might mix with the native flora of Linz. The boundary between natural and artificial is permeable; that’s why the protection of guards and bulletproof glass was deemed necessary by the Linz government. But the permeability inclines less literal minds to explore the inevitably hybrid future wrought by all biotechnology. Releasing blue carnations is an experimental exploration of that future. If it is uncontrolled and irresponsible, that is because the subject under examination is messy and perilous.

Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck is the ultimate artistic license. Mixing disciplines and refusing to be disciplined, purposeful purposelessness calls everything into question. Full exercise of that license was not an option for Lothar Malskat and Alceo Dossena, Han van Meegeren and Eric Hebborn, Elmyr de Hory and Tom Keating, whose grand provocations were mired in motivations of vengeance and profiteering. Unfettered questioning was also beyond the capacity of Elaine Sturtevant and Andy Warhol, even Marcel Duchamp, all of whom ultimately were creatures of gallery and museum. If it has ever been achieved, it was accomplished out of pure curiosity by the man who first made the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo’s curiosity was deeply subversive. His human dissections were deemed acts of desecration and condemned before Pope Leo X. His astronomical observations would also have caused trouble, had they been more fully developed. Though he never claimed that Earth orbited the sun, he deduced that the world would appear from the moon as the moon did from Earth: The impression of motion was relative to where the viewer stood. More generally, Leonardo rejected authority, ancient and contemporary. He called himself a disciple of experience, but he was equally an apostle of investigation.

If art is good for anything, it’s a means of opening the mind. The time has come to dump the Mona Lisa and dismiss Leonardo the talented painter. Fearless artists must resurrect and reinvent Leonardo the renegade scientist.

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