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Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
You're really dipping into existentialism here though, it's not like these are abstract ideas that need qualifying with some sort of philosophical justification.
Marcel Duchamp's material has little relevance to your argument; he was challenging the pre-existing traditional definition of "art", not of some simple concrete object like a musical instrument.
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The way he did it has a lot of parallels to semiotics - How do we know something means what it means?
If I say 'Tree' to you, you think of a large leafy object. Or do you? If I say it with an irish inflection the same word means 'three'
There is a lot more to determining the meaning of an object or a word than simply the object itself. Much like modernism failed because it sought to elevate art outside of the world, attempting to nail down a definition or meaning to an object without an understanding of whats happening AROUND that object is pointless. Nothing happens without being affected by everything else that happens. The renaissance held ideals about grand narratives and so on, that simply don't apply to a post-industrial society. Without that understanding though, the renaissance period in music makes a considerable deal less SENSE. We don't understand why composers thought the way they did about their music without that context of what was popular thinking at the time.