It isn’t even a pipe!
What is the meta message that this painting is trying to convey? Someone please help me understand.
“This is not a pipe.”
It’s just a painting of a pipe.
Yes, both things that you said are apparent at surface value, and i can also see that.
What message is it trying to convey that is not supposed to be apparent?
It really is that simple, and it’s a foundational tenet of post-modernist art, recognizing and emphasizing the distinction between images and the reality they depict:
(Fun Fact; Fascists hate modernism and post-modernism for this reason. Their ideology idolizes certain images and aesthetics as being representative of a greater truth and seeks to reify them by forcing reality to align with their preconceptions. Acknowledging that what we see isn’t the nature of the thing being seen (or in the modernist sense, that there is more than one valid perspective on any subject) would mean admitting that the golden age of the past that they seek to return to is also just an image and not reality. https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/architectural-styles/a2941-the-rejection-of-modern-art-as-a-form-of-fascism/ )
Also, I have tons of these:
those are some quality highbrow memes
I really needed the laugh, thank you for posting this! I adore René Magritte’s art, but I also really love people memeing on his art
It’s a pipe
But it literally says it is not!
Sometimes, I wish I could just grab people by their shirt collars through the internet in a non-threatening frustration kinda way.
Looks like a pipe to me 😊
😑
It is a picture of a pipe, and while it conjures our memories and conceptualization of a pipe, it is, of course, merely a painting of one. Yet there is also the argument that when we see a physical pipe in person, it is only our “mind’s eye” view of a pipe that makes it a pipe. So, in some ways the difference between art and the “real world” is arbitrary. You can carry this as deep (as many layers of meta) or as shallow as you like, and that’s why the painting has inspired such a timeless continuing discussion over the decades of the meaning and significance of art.
