You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
Deciding taste is egotistical, but that's how taste is established, by somebody having the courage to say, 'I don't want to sell that.'
I'm a great believer in the idea of not choosing based on our taste.
We're born with the desire, but we don't really know how to choose. We don't know what our taste is, and we don't know what we are seeing.
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
Once you figure out what respect tastes like, it tastes better than attention. But you have to get there.
I mean, artistic processes are all about making choices all the time, and the very act of making a choice is the distilling down and the getting to the core of what it is that you care about and what you want to say, really.
If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.