Satirical and Ironic Dissolutions of Art: Duchamp's Synthesis

Roy Lichtenstein, “Brushstroke” (1965)

Offset lithograph, 23" x 29" Tate Museum, London

From a Hegelian perspective, Duchamp’s place in the development of the contemporary involves a synthesis of the satiric and ironic modes of art’s previous moments of dissolution. A Hegelian understanding of satire and irony, which are the specific forms taken by the dissolution of Classical and Christian art, will allow us to grasp historically, as a replaying and a synthesis of art’s previous dissolutions, the meaning of the peculiar narcissism, hermeticism and emptiness that afflict the contemporary artworld. That reading reworks the theme of art’s dissolution into an analytic tool, and saves the concept of “the end of art” from being a mere slogan, one charged with nostalgia and despair, but of little value as a term of art-historical and aesthetic understanding.

Once we address art in terms a systematic reading of Hegel’s “Lectures,” we’ll finally be able to apply Hegel’s concept of art’s dissolution to the contemporary artworld by historically grasping the advent of Marcel Duchamp as a replaying of the moment of art’s dissolution. For better or worse, it is in large part Duchamp’s synthesis of the satirical and ironic dissolutions of art that define contemporary art. The revised Hegelian approach that emerges is not merely critical of the contemporary, however, but is also equipped to understand and appreciate it, prepared to retain its most valuable possibilities, and thereby able to remain hopeful about what lies beyond.