[Julie Steiner]

I think we'll have to differ on this, Ross, which will do Enim no harm, since, as you say, she has become quite established and can survive quite well without my good opinion.

And the "But is it art?" debate will continue to rage with or without me, too.

The difference, as I see it, between realists like Soutine, Van Gogh, and Lucien Freud on the one hand, and this piece by Enim (I don't know her other work) on the other, has to do with creativity, compositional and editorial decisions, and craft--all of which, I feel, are necessary in art.

To translate reality into another medium--such as making a 2D representation on a painted canvas, say--absolutely requires the artist to filter it through his or her own experience and emotion. There are artistic and editorial choices in play--colors, composition, etc.

Even with Duchamp's urinal, the whole idea was startlingly original (at that time), he altered what he found (by adding the very visible signature R. Mutt), and he gave it an intriguing title, Fountain. He made artistic choices to filter our experience of this found object.

With My Bed, I don't see any filtering whatsoever going on the part of the artist, even in the title. In fact, that seems to be the whole point--behold this chunk of raw reality, make of it what you will. Every observer is left to interpret it firsthand--which, again, seems to be the point.

But I don't wanna deal with Enim's raw, unfiltered reality. I've got plenty of my own to deal with. If she's going to abdicate the role of artist by not enriching my experience of this reality in any way, I'm not interested. And since we all keep referencing a 1917 piece by Duchamp, found art doesn't even have the virtue of originality anymore.

Granted, My Bed came a few years before Damien Hirst's 2001 messy studio table at the Eyestorm Gallery and Gustav Metzger's 2004 messy workstation at the Tate, both of which got loads of schadenfreude-laden publicity when cleaning staff mistook these pieces for their component crap, and threw all or part of them away. But I don't see a whole lot of creative spark in any of these three "works"; I put that word in quotes because I don't see a whole lot of effort expended, either, although I suppose it was tricky to move them without changing anything. All three artists claimed that these pieces were representational, but I don't think the artists are re-presenting anything. They're just presenting it, raw, and leaving us to our own interpretations. And one wonders how many times we're going to see the same basic idea trotted out again and again by different installation artists.

In my opinion, the only saving grace of such installations is that they force us to have conversations like this, and to reexamine our feelings about the role of the artist, etc., etc. I guess these conversations are somewhat useful...and definitely more pleasant than the conversations I already have with my husband and children about unmade beds. But again, those of us discussing Enim's bed are doing all the work of deriving meaning from it. I agree with M. A. Griffiths that the artist should be expected to bring more effort and talent to the table than the viewer does.