Happy Birthday, Marcel Duchamp! (1887-1968)

Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond Paris 1924

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
photocollage on colored lithograph/letterpress, 
mounted on flat cardboard holder
imitated, rectified readymade
31.5 x 19.5 cm

A firm grasp of what Hegel really meant by the dissolution of art would be a very strong interpretive tool in the contemporary art world.  Of course, the test case for Hegel’s true relevance to contemporary art is the application of the Lectures on Aesthetics to Marcel Duchamp, because Duchamp is by common consent the ürsprung of the contemporary.[1]  In addition, Duchamp’s own aesthetics-or anti-aesthetics-intersects with Hegel’s in a way that reveals much about art’s dissolution.  Arguing strongly for the continuing relevance of the Lectures, Hegel’s philosophy of art illuminates Duchamp’s anti-art, and Duchamp’s work in turn illuminates Hegel’s aesthetics.  Duchamp’s interest in Pyrrhonian philosophy invites an investigation of skepticism as it appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, while the satirical aspects of Duchamp’s work recall Hegel’s treatment of Roman comedy.   Furthermore, Duchamp’s reading of Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own allows us to develop a Hegelian criticism of Duchamp’s work from an ethical perspective, immediately recalling the philosopher’s trenchant criticism of irony during the Romantic period.

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[1]. For example, Kimball complains: “Almost everything championed as innovative in contemporary art is essentially a tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by the likes of Marcel Duchamp” (Kimball, 2008:27).  The conservative position in art writing, for lack of a better word, generally frowns on contemporary art as lacking in aesthetic, moral, and spiritual value, but agrees with advocates of the contemporary on the central importance of Duchamp; “the post-1945 artists of Pop Art, Happenings, Op Art, Fluxus, Conceptual Art…all felt that Duchamp belonged to them, that he was their ‘prototype.’” Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s introduction to Marcel Duchamp, Artist of the Century Eds. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Massachusetts; MIT, 1991) p. 1  Therefore Duchamp is blamed for contemporary artists who uncreatively follow in his footsteps, while the importance of Duchamp in his context is entirely missed.