“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a common saying that stands for truth in some extent. Some might say the Venus de Milo by Alexandros of Antioch, a carved Ancient Greek sculpture with sensual, feminine curves and missing arms is a beautiful depiction of a woman. Yet, the Venus of Gas, by Pablo Picasso, is depicting the same thing as Venus de Milo but in a Modernistic way. Art covers every subject, painting, sculptures, performance and digital art but what determines if art is beautiful? Laurie Adams mentions Plato scholarly theory that beauty is part of the truth in art as well it being part of something created. However Michael Duchamp states that there is no good or bad art for art is art. The Venus of Gas is Picasso ready made…show more content… The rusty, vaguely anthropomorphic shape beams at you like a totem reclaimed from some alien civilization, full of plangent weirdness” is the description of the MOMA of the sculpture. The Venus of Gas is an iron gas burner from a stove, a ready made object that is placed on a pedestal. As stated by Cornelia Muller, the gas burner does not have any reference of a female body or the Venus. Venus, in Roman mythology was the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility; she had multiple lovers and many children from those lovers. The sculpture only starts to take on the perception of a female only after considering the name that Picasso gave it. "If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively and unconsciously”, stated Picasso in an interview about the Guernica painting but, his statement can apply for many of his works like this…show more content… The visual representation of an ancient deity is made by a round ring as the stomach that represents fertility and with two legs and the top is the head part. Not an actual human anatomy but can more or less be seen. Marcel Duchamp argues in his words of what art should look like, that “whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is an emotion.” In Picasso Venus of Gas it is arguably not a “good” way of showing a female but as Duchamp would agree, it is a way. Artistically, Picasso saw what others did not see in an indifferent way. Although by looking at the Venus of Gas the feelings that may arise could be that the ancient object would be let if a temple or a missing piece of something larger. In the 21 century stove turns looks like knobs or there are no turners at all, but in the 20th century it could be reconsider as a dirty stove turner. Part of assemblage or ready made art is to take a found object and give it new meaning. Picasso uses this technique of assemblage, combined with his need to create to make a sculpture to be classified as a piece of art, regardless of
