"Anti-art is art because it has entered into a dialectical dialogue with art, re-exposing contradictions that art has tried to conceal. To think that anti-art raises everything to the level of art is quite wrong. Anti-art exists only within the boundaries of art. Outside these boundaries it exists not as anti-art but as madness, bottle-racks and urinals. " Monty Cantsin - in Smile - a magazine of Neoist origins.

Anti-art is the definition of a work which may be exhibited or delivered in a conventional context but makes fun of serious art or challenges the nature of art. The term is attributed to the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp, whose 1917 work Fountain – a urinal – was a prime example of the genre. The work also served as a Dada manifesto and so the movement is connected with Dada. While Dada is generally taken as a movement fixed in space-time around the early 20th century and Western Europe, anti-art has a wider scope.

Since then various avante-garde art movements have a position on anti-art and the term is also used to describe other intentionally provocative art forms, such as nonsense verse.

The intention is to make the teritory of art contested and difficult and is therefore a locus of class struggle in bourgeois culture. Mail-Art, for example operates outside the official art world and is sent from artist to artist. Exhibitions and publications of mail-art are also often arranged outside the art world.

The Stuckist painters claim to make "Anti-anti-art"

see also:

Anti-Capitalism

Contemporary art

反芸術