Artists (specifically conceptual artists) are generally poor philosophers. You can expect a sort of a hodge-podge of presently fashionable ideas combined with some colloquial observations, banality, and inscrutable turns of phrase.<p>Take the distinction between the natural and the artificial. A colloquial distinction is not especially sensible. It's some kind of conflation between "man-made", not occurring in "nature" and "fake" which confuses a few notions that are not mutually dependent on one another.<p>In the first case, that something is man-made merely means that human beings made it. Water can be synthesized, but there is no difference between the water we find around us and the water we can synthesize. Human production involves the use of reason to modify or transform existing things to produce something else. But transformation of things is very much universal. Our cells transform things. Non-human animals and plants transform things. Stars transform things. The universe is in a constant flux of transformation. While only human beings are known to produce plastic (as far as I know), there is no reason in principle why other life forms or physical processes might not effect plastic.<p>In the second case, the notion of "nature" is a vague, largely romantic idea that doesn't seem to mean anything more than everything that isn't Man or man-made. Distinguishing Man from the rest of the universe is not unreasonable for certain metaphysical reasons (for example, the capacity for reason and thus moral responsibility; artifact as a product of deliberately and directly rational activity). But whence the sense of alienation? Perhaps this has to do with human moral failure. Traditionally, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, men were understood to be stewards of creation (pagan cultures tended toward pantheism which incidentally stifled their scientific development; modernism tends to denigrate the world by adopting a desiccated and reductive metaphysics which, while perhaps practical in some cases, is false). Stewardship is a responsibility and thus a failure in this regard can create a sense of rift.<p>In the third case, "artificial" can mean "fake", something presented as something it is not. But the mere fact that something is man-made doesn't mean it is "fake", and artifactual identity is dependent in part on the cultural conventions it is embedded in.<p>"Nature", in a traditional metaphysical sense, is merely the nature of a thing. There is human nature, the nature of plastic, the nature of water or trees or whatever. These are all real things and their nature is what makes them what they are. Thus, the "unnatural" is that which is opposed to the nature of a thing doing it. We say that a desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is unnatural because the consumption of it has no nutritive value, and the desire to eat is per se ordered toward nutrition. Thus we say that the desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is disordered, even intrinsically disordered. Wishing to cut your arm off is unnatural because human nature is ordered toward self-preservation. "Nature" is very teleological, in other words, but it is <i>the</i> basis for normativity.