The Ready-Made Revolution
Some clever people, camping out in their aesthetic marketplaces and doing their philosophical commerce, actually think that a history of art is possible…As long as you keep it concise! They dissertate about concepts divorced from any context; they gloss, like Plato’s contemporaries, ideas about Beauty-in-itself, the essence of Beauty, ineffable and unspeakable Beauty, or Beauty as a vector of transcendence; that is, they insist on the truth of its existence. From it, they can derive God, who they carefully guard from danger. They get a great deal out of a schema that is so philosophically easy.
The reactionaries among them—in the etymological sense; the most conservative to say the least—forge a common cause with two or three artists who pass for part of an intellectual avant-garde. The media elevates a fool who shares the same aesthetic picnic with scruffy, unknown auteurs who are convinced that their obscurity bespeaks an unfathomable depth. They collect neologisms, webs of glossolalia over the subject of ineffability, the unsayable, the incommunicable, “the veil,” and other baubles of negative theology. It all amounts to a banal, autistic, and solipsistic exercise. No need to speak of proper and formal analysis.
Art comes from history. It lives in, through, and for it. How can we deny the evidence? It eludes the essentialist’s grasp because it is inextricable from matter of the world, hence from all the advancements, retreats, ruptures, obstacles, slow-downs, and revolutions that occur in the history of art. Its guiding factors and induced effects come down to a host of names, figures, and signatures. Thus, Beauty has a history and definitions that are multiple and even contradictory, depending on historical or geographical influences. Contrary to Kant’s Beauty, it is not what is universally pleasing and nonconceptual. Rather, it has to do with what is particular and conceptual.
Art history is shaped by epistemological ruptures. These shifts prepare movements and trends. They realize them; they are dialectical vectors; they produce its effects and consequences, whether good or bad; they cause a movement’s supersession or its maintenance, its arch within a certain moment, its inscription throughout a long period. All of these things are important. Every particular moment contributes to the general movement. There was no Beauty for the men of Lascaux.1 On the other hand, it meant a great deal for the contemporary of Baumgarten,2 before it became a relic for the descendants of Marcel Duchamp.
The very first ready-made was a spark that burned up the entire aesthetic field. Was it a hoax? A joke? A student’s provocation? Anarchist subversion? Facetiousness? A goofy idler’s prank? It could have been all of those things, but it was also a real coup d’état within the little guarded world of art. It turned over a major page of art history: that of the Christian West. Suddenly, there was a new chapter: Contemporary Art. Therefore, I define contemporary art as that which succeeds the first ready-made.
What lesson does this revolution teach? Works of art and Beauty have no intrinsic truth. Rather, truth is relative and conjectural. Art does not proceed from the intelligible world, but from a perceptual construction, a sociological operation. Kant fades away and leaves his place to Bourdieu3…The ready-made object becomes a work of art (a manufactured object, fresh out of a store, exhibited in an environment devoid of aesthetic content). The artist’s intention to produce a work can sometimes suffice to produce it.
On top of that, we can add two major propositions: (1) the viewer produces the work; (2) anything can serve as an aesthetic support. Of course, the artist produces something, but the spectator must also walk their half of the path to complete the aesthetic trajectory. This is the birth of the artistic viewer. Noble matter also disappears as a requirement for art. It gives way to mere material, be it noble or ignoble, trivial or precious, physical or immaterial, and so on.
The Death of Beauty
Duchamp’s most important act brought together all forms of deicide and tyrannicide, as well as other kinds of ontological parricide. Since Plato, there has been a long list of followers—spiritualist Christians, German idealists, and negative theologians—who recycle the antiphony praising a disembodied Beauty divorced from the real world. They lived among things like Truth, Good, and Justice and other fictions that never show themselves in person. Thus, for a long time, objects have been beholden to the Idea. What is absolute beauty’s relation to the Idea? If it is far from it, there is ugliness. If it is close, there is beauty.
The well-known theory of Platonic participation relies as much on this concept as it does on avoiding asking why a judge has the authority to judge.4 When someone decrees that something is beautiful or ugly, from where does he derive the admissibility of his judgment? There really would be nothing ideal or Platonic if not for the social groups that confer such authority: the medieval and Renaissance Church, the Flemish bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century, European monarchies, the industrial revolution’s capitalist State, the liberal Market of contemporary America.
Judgments of mundane taste come out of sociological, political, historical, and geographical webs. They do not come from a conceptual theology that uses Beauty as a substitute for God, since contemporary civilization has begun holding religion in low esteem. This is because there is a homothetic relationship between God and Beauty: what makes up one very often makes up the other. They have identical consistencies and similar logics and are comparable in their invisibility. Very often, art is a substitute for religion or its ally, even though it retains a register of radical immanence. Since they are both uncreated, incorruptible, and inaccessible to even the best-directed pure reason—since they are eternal, immortal, unmovable, unfading, and unalterable—Beauty and God conduct their business hand in hand.
Duchamp consummates Nietzsche’s crime: after the death of God—which also signifies the death of the Good, and thus of Evil and also Beauty, as Nietzsche clearly emphasized in certain passages of The Will to Power—we gain access to an immanent world, a real here and now. An emptied heaven allows for a full earth. With his foundational act, Marcel Duchamp advanced a detheologization of art in favor of a rematerialization of purpose. The sudden and immediate vitality that this movement produced is unmatched in all of art history.
For all of that, this revolution does not succumb to nihilism, the absence of meaning, or conceptual muddles. Quite the contrary: the famous Urinal generated a new paradigm that would shut the door on twenty-five centuries of aesthetics. It stops being about Beauty and starts to take on a greater load of Meaning, which needs to be deciphered. This epistemological rupture turns every object into something of a rebus.
Archeology of the Present
Duchamp’s aesthetic coup created a lasting fragmentation of the artistic field. The Style that once defined an era ends up being destroyed in favor of styles that, paradoxically, make up the Style of a newly created modernity (the paradox is evidence of the cunning of Reason). Prehistoric art’s long reign gives way to an efflorescence of short and sudden periods, which sometimes die as soon as they are born. Five thousand years of Magdalenian art makes up one period, and the same title is given to a single year of the BMPT movement or three years of CoBrA or of New Realism, not to mention everything that has been called a movement that lasted no longer than a single exhibition.
The twentieth century was characterized by acceleration and speed. There were booms, and the old, slow times metamorphosed into a period of hypermodernity, precipitousness, and speed. This shortening of duration engenders anxiety, feverishness, and sickness. In the wake of the chaos of losing our ontological compass, nihilism takes root. Old geological and Virgilian times—the period of nature—give way to the contemporary, virtual, digital age that knows nothing but the pure and simple present.
This tremendous explosion creates surges of energy. Some blaze new routes, avenues, and highways; others are obstructed. On one side, we have an opportunity for a new kind of rich aesthetics that can last, which develops itself and produces chain reactions; in other places, we have aborted experiences and immediately visible negativities. We praise this richness of potentialities because Duchamp’s revolution, by abolishing the reign of univocity and establishing that of plurivocity, engendered more abundance than penury. In fact, within this proliferation, the best rubs against the worst and the masterpiece lays beside a mess.
Hence, judgments of taste about contemporary art cannot be made without risk. Unable to be objective, we are obliged to have an inchoate perspective that disappears over time as the contours of the movement become clearer. A century of art produces a clear map, but it only does this with patience, in slow time that resists accelerating forces.
Dwelling within this Tower of Babel are new possibilities for the field of aesthetics, of course, but also for the fields of ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Art can be a matrix within which existential revolutions can occur. Aesthetics plays a major role in the constitution of new kinds of knowledge beyond itself. It should be understood not as an ideological superstructure, but as a mental infrastructure used by all sectors of society. Contrary to bourgeois considerations that use transcendent Beauty to negate the tremendous revolutionary power of art, we should reveal the chance for immanence that this field of possibilities offers.
At the same time, this Tower of Babel houses a lot of dross. That is the negative aspect of this vital process. In it we find the traces and signs of our era’s nihilism. Today’s intellectual and cultural poverty also shows itself in many of the propositions of contemporary aesthetics. If we want to defend contemporary art, we must avoid celebrating, en bloc, what should be patiently sorted through. We have to separate wonderful positivity from residual negativity. We should defend active forces and reject reactive forces. Hence, art criticism requires a kind of forensic analysis.