New Art Is Up To The Tusk

The age-old debate about What Is Art grew four new legs when paintings by a six-ton Thai elephant found their way across the ocean and onto the walls of Edinburgh's Dundas Street Art Gallery. Paya, the dexterous elephant-turned-artist responsible, is claimed to have painted - among other things - her self-portrait after being trained to hold a brush in her trunk. This, as you might expect, has attracted much bemusement in the art world. In a sense it takes us back almost 90 years, when French pop artist Marcel Duchamp pitched up at an art gallery, urinal in hand, and announced he had created a sculpture. Decades and concepts apart they may be, yet each define the same conundrum: who decides what qualifies as art and what constitutes an artist? For the full story - click the title Irish Art