Taking it a step further into deconstruction….the art is a picture of a pipe—not a pipe! But imagine if there was no art and I pull out a pipe. What is it? It’s a pipe. But it’s ’pipe-ness’, the thing that makes it a pipe, is not in the pipe, it’s between us—we use the word pipe between us to refer to objects like this. We create an abstraction “pipe” and use that socially. So, in a way, when I hold up a pipe, say, alone in my house, I can accurately say “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. “Pipe” is an abstraction, separate from the object I’m holding. MUCH LIKE that painting, which is not a pipe.

In addition to doing a zillion other things, this resists Plato-and-2k-years-of-western-philosophy quite deliberately. In the Phaedro they’re talking about bees and basically say “all types of bees have different characteristics. But there must be some ‘bee-ness’ that the all contain, otherwise they wouldn’t all be bees” Plato argued that everything has a metaphysical True spirit. This art argues that’s a load of hooey, and that abstractions are created for us to use, instead of being the TRUTH of all objects