Lebenskünstler

…art history can only end, in a context where history does not end if art is separated off from the world in a crucial way…

…

For Baruchello, his farm is crucially both a context for generating works of art, and as such a context is itself a kind of artwork…for Baruchello, providing such a context is precisely what constitutes some works of art as works of art…[Duchamp’s] Bicycle Wheel has aesthetic import precisely when it is a context for further work.

…

Baruchello isn’t attempting to appreciate his environment, but to creatively live within it…Baruchello is not just interested in noticing that which is background, but rather living with his environment in such a way that something new, whether it be an artwork or a way of thinking, is brought into the world.

…

Baruchello’s point in the end is that the imagination of his book’s title is not the exclusive property of the artworld, being more connected with a way of life, an aesthetics of the everyday, in which imaginings play a regular and important part.

…

He even momentarily imagines that artists and art critics (he doesn’t mention aestheticians) everywhere might plant, grow, sell potatoes, sugar beets, and so forth, hopefully creating abundance of that which is needed for life. Here the artist’s involvement with the land could be life-enhancing, unlike what he sees as happening with land art. We have, then, an illustration, resembling many of Danto’s own in that we are dealing with indiscernibles. However, in this case art is pushed out into the world of the everyday, rather than the world of the everyday being pushed into art.

…

Baruchello will not exhibit his work. He refuses to turn it into a thing at a distance. It is to stay in the world of the everyday, serving as the occasion for imagining, speaking, and acting.

…

…takes art out of its characteristic domain so that it no longer finds direction qua art, but only insofar as it aligns itself with other nonatristic projects…Furthermore, that works of art might in their own unique way intelligibly contribute to other perhaps significant profound projects accords with the idea of art’s liberation from the pedestal.

…

In this he succeeds in pointing to an aesthetics of the everyday where the world becomes an occasion for speaking, acting, and imagining. In fact for Baruchello, this sort of aesthetics of the everyday is precisely what gives art the possibility for purpose and direction…But Baruchello’s farm art does help make the point…that an aesthetics of everyday life need employ no particular or special way of seeing an environment that is out there and separate, but rather aspires to find a context for living that promotes speaking, acting, and imagining.