Duchamp's Mischief

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Duchamp's MischiefAuthor(s): Joel RudinowSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer, 1981), pp. 747-760Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343148

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Duchamp's Mischief

Joel Rudinow

The twentiethcentury brought in a time that could be called "theend of philosophy and the beginning of art."

-JOSEPH KOSUTH,"Art After Philosophy"

From philosophersbred to expect a certainstylisticausterity,I begindulgence for what may strike them as an intolerable wildness inthe following paper. . .. But in a way the paper is part of its own

subject,since it becomes an artwork at the end. Perhapsthe finalcreation in the period it treatsof. Perhapsthe final artwork n the

history of art!-ARTHUR C. DANTO,Artworksand Real Things"

It iscertainly

a curiousage: philosophers

addressartworks o eachother,and artists profess what would be philosophy if they had not alreadypronounced philosophy dead and laid claim to its legacy of concerns.What turn has the traditionof tensionbetween art and philosophytaken?Do they now cheerfully trade in each other'sdiscourse?Hardly.Forthis

trading reflects no relaxationof the tension, no reconciliationbetweenartistsand philosophers. There is no merger of interestsand concernsnor growth of any fellowship of mutual respect. There has been noceremonialexchange of mutualor even reciprocalentitlement.Neither

marriagenor

treatymitigatesthe distance and

hostilitybetween the two

traditions.And the claims each tradition makes to autonomous sover-

eignty over its own discoursego undiminished.No, the tradinggoes on

boldly, without the slightest deference to the territorialclaims of the

opposition. This is most evident in the reactions of the one tradition to

? 1981 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/81/0704-0010$01.00

747



748 Joel Rudinow Duchamp'sMischief

the commerce of the other. Respect for the boundaries between art and

philosophy has deteriorated, but the ensuing affairs have been protestedas violations against the legitimate order of discourse. Arthur Danto, forinstance, says that "Rosenberg thus reads the canvas as an arena in whicha real action occurs when an artist (but nota bene: only when an artist)makes a wipe of paint on it".'And, on the other hand, Richard Sclafaniretorts to Joseph Kosuth's conceptual art manifesto:2

Conceptual artworks do not stand alone. They require historians,critics, and theoreticians of not inconsiderable abilities to be ren-dered intelligible as art. Contrary to what the conceptualist prophet

would have us believe, he cannot be his own best critic. This lastpoint becomes painfully obvious when we are forced to view the

badly mangled remains of Wittgenstein, Ayer, Merleau-Ponty,Urmson, von Wright, Morton White, and even Kant when they arecalled upon in support of conceptual art theses.3

As if to vivify the nature of the offense against philosophy, Sclafaniretaliates in kind: "Perhaps we should now leave art to philosophers,who would seem to be, on this thesis, especially well suited to the tasks

of 'framing propositions,' 'advancing investigations, 'initiating inquiries,'etc."4Does this not evoke the frontier figure of the claim jumper? Andwith the writings of conceptual art as a text, can one resist the image ofthese accused claim jumpers, conceptual artists, responding, "Squatter'srights!"?

The age-old struggle between art and philosophy, so long nurturedand waged between traditions whose domains were secure and whose

boundaries, though they had never been properly surveyed, were un-

controversial, has taken a new turn in this century. It has degeneratedinto the sort of territorial squabbling proper to an unsettled and lawless

region. Before we rush to the defense of our favorite side, perhaps thereis a lesson to be learned from this transformation. Perhaps this trans-

formation is a sort of turning-inside-out of that age-old feud. Perhaps

1. Arthur C. Danto, "Artworks and Real Things," Theoria39 (1973): 16.

2. See Joseph Kosuth's "Art After Philosophy," Studio International 178 (1969); rpt. in

Ursula Meyer, comp., ConceptualArt (New York, 1972), pp. 155-70.

3. Richard Sclafani, review of ConceptualArt (Meyer, comp.), TheJournal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism32 (1974): 443-44.4. Ibid., p. 444.

Joel Rudinow, a conceptual artist, is currently working on a mul-timedia satire entitled Higher Learnin'; or, The Song and Dance of Socrates:In Which the Love of WisdomLeads to the Discoverythat the Unlived Life IsNot WorthExamining.



CriticalInquiry Summer1981 749

we are blessed with a wonderful opportunity to contemplate its inner

works for the first time in the light of day. Be that as it may, the trans-

formation is interesting enough at first glance to attract a second, andat second glance to call for an investigation, for which I propose a first

principle: that we do not satisfy ourselves with results which do not

explain the significance of Marcel Duchamp. An investigation of art and

philosophy in these times which seeks to explain Duchamp has a lot of

explaining to do; in order to indicate some of the items on the agenda,I will first review some of the literature in philosophy of art and some

developments in art in this century.I call attention first to an article by Morris Weitz, "The Role of

Theory in Aesthetics," which seriously disrupted philosophy of art in itsday and which is still a powerful influence.5 Prior to its publication in

1956, one, if not the, central project for philosophy of art had been to

provide what was called a "theory of art." This was understood to be a

general definition of art's essential nature which would specify the nec-

essary and sufficient conditions for something's qualifying as art. It wasfurther understood that the specifics of any proposed theory of art must

correspond in certain ways with how the community in which the notionof art has currency actually employs that notion. It was no good simply

to stipulate a definition of art; one's theory had to be recognizable as atheory of art. So, for example, certain works of art were treated for theintents and purposes of theory of art as paradigmatic.In other words, itwas held of such a work that if anything is a work of art, this must be

(or if this is not a work of art, nothing is). Thus a constraint on theoryof art was widely employed: a theory of art which specifies conditionssuch that a paradigmatic artwork fails to qualify as art thereby destroysits own credibility by inadvertently disqualifying everything, includingwhatever meets its specified conditions, from the category of art. If, for

example, a theory has as a consequence that the Mona Lisa, or David, orBeethoven's Fifth Symphony is not a work of art, the theory is objec-tionable on this ground alone. By means of such constraints the projectof providing a theory of art maintained contact with what the artworldsaid and did. The project of providing a theory of art could thus beunderstood as the attempt to articulate, in concise detail, the funda-mentals of the practice and discourse of the artworld.

Weitz raised the question Is theory of art possible?and indeed sug-gested that it is not. Weitz did not intend to suggest, however, that pro-

viding a concise, detailed articulation of the fundamentals of the practiceand discourse of the artworld was impossible--only that to do so byproviding a theory of art was impossible. Indeed he took pains to saythat only by abandoning the theoretical project could one hope to ap-

5. Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics," TheJournal of Aestheticsand ArtCriticism 14 (1956): 27-35.




proach such an articulation. Weitz did not understand there to be a veryprofound connection between articulating the practice and discourse of

the artworld and providing a theory of art-though such a connectionis apparently observed by theorists of art throughout the period Weitz

surveys. Weitz's case, which was essentially a review of the inconclusive

history of competing theories of art and an adaptation of an item of

Wittgenstein's philosophy of language to explain this chronicle of failure,was presented with such persuasive force that no notable contributionsto theory of art were made for nearly ten years in the article's wake, and

all subsequent work in the area has been addressed one way or anotherto the doubts it raised.

More to my main point: there has been a crucial shift in the structureof the project of providing a theory of art. In the literature which Weitz

addresses and comments on, the project of providing a theory of art is

consolidated around the puzzle of comprehending the diversity of the

arts. The project is to provide a single unified theory of art applicable

equally to music, poetry, painting, drama, and so on. Thus it is not

surprising that Weitz's objections to various historic theories of art are

couched in terms of their uneven plausibility across generic boundarieswithin the arts. Now that interest in theory of art has once again been

rejuvenated, it is apparent that the project has been reframed and isnow animated by the puzzle of comprehending the ready-mades of

Marcel Duchamp within the bounds of art.

This is of course an interpretive claim. But it looms to the point of

inevitability when one considers the crucial office that the ready-madescome to occupy in the discussion Weitz has precipitated. In the tradition

and literature Weitz addresses and comments on, the examples in terms

of which theoretical success or failure is assessed tend to be, if not amongthe

paradigmatic exemplarsof

art,at least uncontroversial instances of

the traditionally recognized art forms. In this tradition it is a standard

argumentative strategy to exhibit the merits of one's theory of art by

deftly applying it to such examples and to expose competing theories

as defectively awkward in such applications. If one runs an inventoryon these examples, one discovers nothing the least bit extraordinary vis-

a-vis their status as artworks. In the literature addressed to Weitz, the

chief characteristic of the examples of art discussed is their prima facie

outlandishness as artworks. The ready-mades and subsequent excursions

into the unheard-of predominate.Here is a related item of similar significance: the only theory of art

to have been explored since Weitz, the so-called institutional theory of

art, was apparently fashioned specifically to comprehend the ready-mades within art and its traditions. George Dickie, whose version of the

theory I will discuss shortly, goes so far as to say: "In fact, the strangeand startling innovations of Duchamp and his latter-day followers such




as Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Oldenberg have suggested to me thedefinition I have given."6

It remains an open question whether the institutional theory of artis sufficient to what it is apparently fashioned for. Contemporary theoryof art, however, must face a question which goes deeper than the meritsof the institutional theory, that is, the question of Duchamp's significance,which in the present context can be rephrased (with intended similarityto Weitz): Is it possibleto comprehend Duchamp within art?

Many philosophers of art now conceive of it as their primary concernin connection with the question What is art? to comprehend Duchampwithin the scope of art. This is hardly incidental to the new configurationof the struggle between philosophy and art. Neither is it incidental thata tradition of artists proceeding from Duchamp regards the questionWhat is art? as their central artisticundertaking.

If Duchamp's importance to current theory of art and his promi-nence as an influence and point of departure for artists can be tracedto any single feature of his activity, it is no doubt that he brought the

question What is art? into the very center of his activity. Those who most

closely identify themselves (as artists) with Duchamp point repeatedlyto what they take to be his "art theoretical" concern, his philosophicalpreoccupations. In Kosuth's words:

In fact it is Duchamp whom we can credit with giving art its own

identity.... With the first unassisted Ready-made, art changed itsfocus. . . . All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual. . . . Particularartists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much theyquestioned the nature of art.7

And if members of the philosophical tradition react to these develop-

ments in the artworld with a measure of proprietary concern, this canbe understood in view of the Socratic, and therefore traditionally phil-osophical, form of the question What is art?

But there is a puzzle in this: all sides are agreedthat Duchamp is thefirst Socratic artist. Should we not then expect Philosophy and Art to

join hands and to raise voices in a chorus of celebration, jointly pro-claiming the day of a new cooperative Art/Philosophy? Should there notbe feasting and dancing in the streets instead of all this sniping? Clearlythen the consensus about Duchamp and his significance is superficial;

some deeper perversity underlies the state of affairs.The clue to the problem is this: the connection between Duchamp

and Socrates is not exhausted in the form of the question What is art?

or in the seriousness of the theoretical problem that question is supposed

6. George Dickie, "The Institutional Conception of Art," in Language and Aesthetics,ed. Benjamin R. Tilghman (Lawrence, Kans., 1973), p. 27.

7. Kosuth, "Art After Philosophy," pp. 161-62.




to express. There is an obvious and crucial dimension of mischief left

entirely out of all such discussions of Duchamp (and equally out of all

such discussions of Socrates, but that is another story).8To take Duchamp

seriously is a challenge to which neither philosophers nor artists have

been equal. Even the most energetic and ingenious attempts are riddled,in spite of themselves, with irony. How in the world can the first Socratic

event in the history of art be either the end of philosophy or the beginningof art? Lo and behold it is both! It is equally ironic that the philosophicaltradition, which claims special sovereignty over Socratic questions, has

devised a theory of art specifically to comprehend Duchamp and his

ready-mades within art.And how does the institutional theory of art propose to accomplishthis extraordinary feat of comprehension-like the conceptual artist

Kosuth, by discovering Duchamp at the very center of all that is art.

What makes something art, according to the institutional theory of art,

taking Dickie's formulation of it as representative, is its having had the

status of candidate-for-appreciation-as-art conferred on it by an agentof the artworld. Duchamp's ready-mades, stripped bare of all other nor-

mal, but on this view accidental, features of art, become the best illus-

trations, the very embodiment, of the essence of art.

It is a development within the domain of painting and sculpture-Dadaism-that most easily reveals the institutional essence of art.

Duchamp and friends conferred the status of art on "ready-mades"(urinals, hatracks, snow shovels, and the like), and when we reflect

on their deeds we can take note of a kind of human action which

has until now gone unnoticed and unappreciated-the action of

conferring the status of art. Painters and sculptors, of course, have

been engaging all along in the action of conferring this status onthe objects they create. As long, however, as the created objectswere conventional, given the paradigms of the times, the objectsthemselves and their fascinating exhibited properties were the fo-

cus of the attention of not only spectators and critics but of phi-

losophers of art as well. ... They entirely ignored the nonexhibited

property of status. When, however, the objects are bizarre, as those

of the Dadaists are, our attention is forced away from the objects'obvious properties to a consideration of the objects in their social

context. As works of artDuchamp's "ready-mades" may

not be

worth much, but as examples of art they are very valuable for art

theory.9

8. I deal with this in another essay, "Plato's Riddle of Intimacy."9. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic:An InstitutionalAnalysis(Ithaca, N.Y., 1974): pp. 32-33;

the original expression of Dickie's position is in his "Defining Art,"TheAmericanPhilosophical

Quarterly6 (1969): 253-56.




The best that can be said for this is that it is very clever. Too clever;

magical. I follow Ted Cohen, who says:

Dickie calls Duchamp's "Fountain" a work of art with no hesitation,and I think he believes it a substantial achievement of his definitionthat it easily accommodates things like the works of Dada. But doesit? I agree that whatever Dada's practitioners thought, their accom-

plishment was not simply the creation of Un-art. It was, however,the creation of something different. .. I am not clear about whether"Fountain" is a work of art, just like that.

....What is wrong with

Dickie's definition, I think, is that as Dickie takes it, it is clear andit clearly applies to "Fountain." No definition should fit "Fountain"

so comfortably. Why not takes some explaining.'0

If having centralized Duchamp within art is an embarrassment to

theory of art, it is an equal embarrassment to conceptual art as well, asis evident from the following comical dialectic which is immediately gen-erated between the two about how a central Duchamp must be under-stood. The attentive reader will have noticed it already in previous quo-tations from Kosuth and Dickie. Conceptual art has Duchamp asking a

question which the institutional theory of art has him answering. Con-

ceptual art accordingly understands Duchamp to have made a cleanbreak with artistic traditions, just where the institutional theory of art

regards him as most thoroughly and deeply continuous with them. Thisis a doubly strange point of disagreement, since it underlies apparentlyperfect agreement about which camp Duchamp belongs in.

I find it amusing in this connection to imagine the fabled emperoron parade in his new suit of clothes. In his attendance are the two faithfulministers he had separately sent to preview the cloth. Each of the min-isters harbors a secret doubt, involved in which is a view of how the

clothes appear to everyone else in the company. There is a tendency,well known to all swindlers and practical jokers, for a person to fly inthe face of whatever common sense he may have rather than sacrificewhat it would cost to admit having already been taken in. I can no longerresist suggesting that, like the cloth woven for the emperor, the ready-mades would be both dazzling and completely transparent if understoodas a certain sort of practical joke. There is something to be learned froman analogy between that portion of the history of art in which Duchampis involved and the fable of the emperor's clothes. But it must be keptin mind that this is only an analogy. The emperor and his ministers wereswindled, and the sort of practical joke I have in mind is not a swindle.

One thing I shall have to address is what the relevant differences are.But practical jokes do have a good deal in common with swindles. For

10. Ted Cohen, "The Possibility of Art: Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie,"'ThePhil-

osophicalReview 82 (1973): pp. 71, 79.




one thing, neither a practical joke nor a swindle succeeds without a

certain cooperative contribution on the part of the victim. In both swin-

dles and practical jokes, the victim plays the dual role of victim andwilling, if unwitting, accomplice. I will explore this analogy by offeringan account of the willingness with which the ready-mades were eventuallyreceived as art. The account is based on the view that willingness is

strictly linked in all the appropriately profound ways with believing that

one has something to gain or avoid losing. I won't argue for this view,since I think it is obvious, but merely produce a story about what is at

stake for the artworld, including of course art's theorists, in the issue of

Duchamp's significance.

The central feature of the story is a description of the institutionalcontext in which Duchamp found himself situated-the membership of

what Danto, and Dickie after him, have called the artworld:

The core personnel of the artworld is a loosely organized, butnevertheless related, set of persons including artists (understoodto refer to painters, writers, composers), producers, museum di-

rectors, museum-goers, reporters for newspapers, critics for pub-lications of all sorts, art historians, art theorists, philosophers of

art, and others. These are the people who keep the machinery of

the artworld working and thereby provide for its continuing ex-istence. In addition, every person who sees himself as a memberof the artworld is thereby a member.""

It seems to me that something very much like this is true. But I will

elaborate the story in my own words because I want to introduce a twist,and it is better that I don't do it by twisting Dickie's words. Specifically,I think it's false that everyone who sees himself as a member of the

artworld is thereby a member. That's too simple, too straightforward,

and too democratic a formulation to capture the membership conditionswhich are in actual employment, though these are comparably vacuous.

The twist I want to introduce concerns the membership conditions of

the artworld. In order to do this I must first introduce the notion of a

"fellowship of discourse."'2The notion is based on certain familiar mechanisms for establishing

conversational groups. Because a great deal of conversational behavior

is meant to elicit conversation from one's fellow conversants, one means

to discourage unwanted conversants from entry into the discourse is by

systematically excluding them from the category of those from whomone's conversational behavior is meant to elicit responses. One can, in

short, address oneself selectively to a certain individual or group to the

exclusion, pointed or otherwise, of certain others. Should one omit, or

11. Dickie, Art and theAesthetic,pp. 35-36.

12. The term is borrowed from Michel Foucault's "Discourse on Language" (The

Archaeologyof Knowledge[New York, 1970]); the analysis is my own.



CriticalInquiry Summer 1981 755

fail in, the attempt to forestall unwanted contributions to the conver-

sation, one can ignore or bypass or dismiss such contributions. One can

refuse to respond or respond so as to restore the conversation as quicklyas possible to what would have been its course had no such advance beenmade. The categories of "insider" and "outsider" are established andfilled through these and other similar mechanisms, and we may call adiscourse in which these mechanisms are employed a "closed discourse."The insiders to a closed discourse constitute a community in virtue of

their presumably shared interest in the cooperative activity in which theyarejointly engaged. We may speak of a "community of discourse," mean-

ing the insiders to a closed discourse, and of the "principle of closure,"

meaning the feature or set of features which defines membership in the

community of discourse. Thus, "fellowship of discourse" may be definedas a community of discourse whose discourse is closed according to a

principle of closure of the following sort: membership is restricted tothose who undertake (1) to treat as an insider any member (or any ofa certain more or less definitely specified subset of the membership) and

(2) to treat as an outsider anyone who does not meet this twofold con-dition.

It is not difficult to see what function, other than mere amusement,such an arrangement would have for insiders. The most natural func-tional interpretation of the arrangement, where any real and seriousstakes are involved, is as a response to insecurity about one's positionwithin the community of discourse. The peculiar structure of a fellow-

ship of discourse is thoroughly adapted to this function. It brings the

security of the insider's position under the insider's control by makingthe posture of the would-be member toward the established membershipcrucial to his acceptability as an insider in at least three ways: first, theobvious

waycontained in condition 1; second, condition 2 amounts to

a requirement that the would-be member agree to collaborate in the

imposition of condition 1; third, condition 2 also functions as a perpet-uator by requiring the would-be member to agree to collaborate in im-

posing it on would-be members, thus centralizing the first two consid-erations in perpetuity.

Nor is it difficult to see how serious interest in such an arrangementmight arise. Think of any well-developed community of discourse thor-

oughly woven into the fabric of civilized human institutions whose dis-course is closed

accordingto some other

principleof closure.

Imagine,for instance, a community of discourse open only to those with the abilityto perform some specifiable service for which there is a history of heavydemand, so that considerable value is attached by both insiders andoutsiders to the status of the insider. Now imagine that the demand forthe service suddenly drops off or finds more convenient satisfactionelsewhere. Immediate crisis. Individuals who have spent years, some-times whole lives, in acquiring and refining the skills of their craft sud-




denly find their livelihoods and lifestyles in jeopardy. The terrible ques-tion Will I be able to continue to provide for myself through the exercise

of my dearly acquired skills? comes alive. Still, one has one's skills, andthere may emerge a way of answering this question affirmatively. It mayno longer be possible to give a coherent account of the organizationalbasis of these skills in the specifiable service for which they were devel-

oped. However, it may be possible to reconstitute the community ofdiscourse as a fellowship of discourse and to convince everyone that

traditional skills and sensibilities tied to their exercise continue to be

crucial to inside status and that these skills and sensibilities continue to

be exercised in ways continuous with their origins and, accordingly, merit

continued patronage. In order to function in this way as a security device,the whole affair requires that inside status be valued by both insidersand outsiders; in effect, the arrangement must be maintained as an

institution and not allowed to degenerate into a mere amusement.This of course indicates the risk which accompanies the advantages

of the device as a security measure. Hand in hand with the advantageof security as an insider goes a certain vulnerability, namely, that the

whole arrangement will be exposed for what it is with the result that no

value will be attached

by any

outsider to the status of

being

an insider,

thereby collapsing whatever mystique surrounds, and must surround,inside status. The risk is generally a reasonable and bearable one since,

given the mystique surrounding inside status, it is reasonable to assume

that any insider will have an investment in his position, that he will attach

value to inside status, which he enjoys, and therefore that he will not act

so as to expose the basis of that status, even to himself, where such

exposure would deflate the value of the status; and further that no

outsider will know enough or be in a position credibly to effect such an

expose.The real risk then is that some insider will become disillusioned,

will cease to value inside status and expose the enterprise for his own

amusement, say as a practical joke.Of course I have it in mind that the artworld is a fellowship of

discourse, that Duchamp is the insider who, due either to disappoint-ment, frustration, general irreverence, or some combination thereof, has

few illusions about the importance of being an artist in earnest, and that

the ready-mades are egg on the artworld's face. There are numerous

indications in the history of art of the period, in Duchamp's own history,and in his

publishedremarks to

support

this as a highlyplausible

reading.In 1912, for example, Duchamp is asked to withdraw Nude Descendinga Staircasefrom the Salon des Independants, an incident on which Du-

champ later comments:

Rubbing elbows with artists, the fact that one lives with artists, thatone talks with artists, displeased me a lot. There was an incidentin 1912 which "gave me a turn," so to speak; when I brought the




"Nude Descending a Staircase" to the Independants, and they askedme to withdraw it before the opening. In the most advanced group

of the period, certain people had extraordinary qualms, a sortof fear! People ... who were, nevertheless, extremely intelligent,found that this "Nude" wasn't in the line they had predicted. Cub-ism had lasted two or three years, and they already had an abso-

lutely clear, dogmatic line on it, foreseeing everything that mighthappen. I found that naively foolish. So, that cooled me off somuch that, as a reaction against such behavior coming from artistswho I had believed to be free, I got a job. . . . I made this gestureto rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clearconscience. 13

Shortly thereafter Duchamp abandons all conventional forms of paintingand drawing and in 1913 produces the first ready-made:

Please note that I didn't want to make a work of art out of it. Theword "readymade" did not appear until 1915, when I went to theUnited States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicyclewheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a "readymade"or anything else. It was just a distraction.

....It's always the idea

of "amusement" which causes me to dothings.14

Three years later Fountain, the most notorious of Duchamp's gestures,appears:

CABANNE:.. You were also among the founding members of theSociete des Independants, and at the first exhibition you pre-sented a porcelain urinal called "Fountain," signed by R. Mutt,which was rejected.

DUCHAMP:No, not rejected. A work can't be rejected by the

Independants.CABANNE: Let's just say that it wasn't admitted.DUCHAMP: It was simply suppressed. I was on the jury, but I wasn't

consulted, because the officials didn't know that it was I who hadsent it; I had written the name "Mutt" on it to avoid connectionwith the personal. The "Fountain" was simply placed behind a

partition and, for the duration of the exhibition, I didn't knowwhere it was. I couldn't say that I had sent the thing, but I thinkthe organizers knew it through gossip. No one dared mentionit. I had a falling out with them, and retired from the organi-zation. After the exhibition, we found the "Fountain" again,behind a partition, and I retrieved it!

CABANNE:It's a little like the same adventure you had with the

Ind~pendants in Paris, in 1912.

13. Duchamp quoted in Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues withMarcel Duchamp(New York,1971), p. 17.

14. Ibid., p. 47.




DUCHAMP: Exactly. I have never been able to do anything that was

accepted straight off, but to me that wasn't important.

CABANNE: You say that now, but at the time... ?DUCHAMP: No, no, on the contrary! Still it was rather provocative.CABANNE: Well, since you were looking for scandal, you were sat-

isfied?DUCHAMP: It was, indeed, a success. In that sense.CABANNE: You really would have been disappointed had the "Foun-

tain" been welcomed ...DUCHAMP: Almost. As it was, I was enchanted.'5

Moreover, painting, within which all of Duchamp's relevant activity is

situated, seems to have undergone, in the fifty or so years precedingDuchamp's involvement, just the sort of crisis I described above as con-

ducive to the development of a fellowship of discourse. I am encouraged

along these lines by art historians such as E. H. Gombrich who stress

photography's importance to the revolutionary tendency of painting in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the not unrelatedfact that photography is rooted as a technology in the painter's traditional

craft. 16

However, I will leave the further enumeration and the wranglingover of such details to scholarship. Let us suppose that the artworld isa fellowship of discourse on which the ready-mades are played as a

practical joke. The effect of the joke is to come dangerously near to

exposing the structure of a fellowship of discourse as the fundamental

basis of the artworld's practice and discourse. So near does it come as

to ruin whole sections of art's developing mythos, leaving the artworld's

credibility in need of further salvage efforts on the part of those members

who remain deeply committed to its survival. Thus one can understand

a willingness to enshrine the ready-mades as pivotal art even to the pointof remodeling subsequent art (Kosuth) or previous art (Dickie) in their

image. If the ready-mades do threaten to bring down an elaborate but

equally fraudulent edifice, one can understand a willingness in those

around whose ears the thing must fall to reinterpret the ready-madesin some manner compatible with the continued good standing of the

edifice, that is, as something other than the practical joke they are, for

instance as pivotal artworks.But wouldn't it be simpler and neater to dismiss the ready-mades

out of hand since they appear to be anything but art? Well, yes, if that

were possible. In order to see how it is impossible, however, we need to

go one step further into the mechanism of the ready-mades as a gesture.Here I agree with Michael Fried, who says that the ready-mades "have

15. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

16. See E. H. Gombrich, "Illusion and Visual Deadlock," Meditations on a HobbyHorse

and OtherEssayson the Theoryof Art (New York, 1963), p. 151.




equipped one to treat virtually any object as a work of art-though it is

far from clear exactly what that means."" But that'sjust it. They are the

antithesis of the paradigmatic artworks with which theory of art con-cerned itself prior to Duchamp-"antiparadigms" of art. One wants to

say of Fountain, "If this is art, what isn't?" Notice that should such a thing

acquire the status of a work of art, the effect is equivalent to a dem-

onstration that there's very little to the business of being an artist-one

need only occupy a certain position within a certain community of dis-

course, the artworld. And this is dangerously near to exposing the art-

world as a fellowship of discourse since it shows that the artworld cannot

be viewed as constituted on the basis of the possession of any special

skills. Ordinarily, I suppose, one would say of such a thing as Fountainthat whatever it is, it isn't art. Perhaps it is philosophy, whatever that is.

But suppose the artworld is a fellowship of discourse. Duchamp is clearlyan insider. No wonder then about the tenacity of Fountain as art. So longas Duchamp continues to have a plausible claim to inside status and

maintains that the ready-mades are addressed to the artworld as the

products of his activity as an artist (by entering them in shows, by the

publication of The Blind Man, and so on), the dismissal of the ready-mades is virtually out of the question, and only two courses remain open

to insiders: declare the bankruptcy of the artworld or follow Duchamp.This situation suggests additional features of the fable of the em-

peror's new clothes. It is, for instance, precisely insecurity about fitnessfor one's position which baffles the perceptions of everyone in the fablewho gets taken in and which blocks the commonsense inferences which

nonetheless eventuate in a nagging-doubt epidemic. Furthermore, the

swindle is finally perceived by the only uninhibited figure in the fable:

the child who recognizes the situation is uninfected by serious grown-up attitudes and is the only one whose productive activity is likely to

issue out of amusement rather than a sense of responsibility.But perhaps we have dwelt sufficiently on strong points in the sug-

gested analogy, for they are beginning to reveal the analogy's limits. We

began by assimilating the ready-mades to the cloth woven for the em-

peror, implying a comparison between Duchamp and the swindlers; we

lately find ourselves assimilating the ready-mades to the child's utteranceat the emperor's parade, implying a comparison between Duchamp and

the child. I believe that in the end both comparisons are essential to a

thorough understanding of Duchamp's significance; it is also, however,

essential that each comparison temper and qualify the other. The swin-dlers begin and end as aliens to the community on which they practicetheir art. Duchamp is as much inside the artworld as is the child inside

his community. On the other hand, Duchamp is not disenfranchised, asis the child, though, like the child, he is innocent of certain illusions

17. Michael Fried quoted by Cohen, "Possibility of Art," p. 71.




typical of full enfranchisement. Like the swindlers, and unlike the child,

Duchamp is full of guile. He pointedly produces something ambiguous,something which supports diametrically opposed readings, dependingon where one's bets are placed. One of the readings amounts to a critiqueof the other reading as a hoax. But unlike the swindle, whose effective-ness depends on the degree to which the critique remains hidden and

the hoax enjoys free rein, Duchamp's gesture is effective, as is the child's

unambiguous announcement, to the degree that the critique embarrassesthe hoax. It seems, then, that Duchamp embodies some rare and inter-

esting combination of guile and innocence which the fable keeps apart

by dividing them between agents whose activities are at cross-purposes.The limitation of the fable as an analogy is that it provides no model for

the combination. The fable contains the figures of the swindler, of the

gullible mark, and of the observer so innocent as to be incapable of

duplicity. What we are confronted with in Duchamp is the figure of the

wise guy.I have already suggested that if one is looking for a model on which

to base an appreciation of the Duchamp of the ready-mades, one could

hardly do better than the figure of Socrates. The parallels between Du-

champ's activity and impact and that of Socrates are close and proliferate,though to be sure there are also important differences. Socrates' activitycontributed to his death in a way in which Duchamp's activity never

could have contributed to his. Nevertheless, there is a profound affinityof style between the two figures which threatens to collapse the notion

of lover of wisdom into the notion of wise guy. I do not understand this

speculation to be idle. The idea that Duchamp is a Socraticfigure helpsto explain the simultaneous interest taken by theory of art in Duchampand by artists in theory of art. I think, however, that it is fair to ask

where this suggestion ultimately points. Does Duchamp become a phi-losopher in the end? Or Socrates a prankster? Can it be that what phi-

losophers have followed in Socrates as an invitation to theoretical inquiryis really an elaborate parody of linguistic and intellectual pretensionsabroad in his Athens, a parody whose effects include setting the philo-

sophical and artistic traditions in misbegotten and confused oppositionto each other? I must admit that this second alternative amuses me more

than the first, but to adjudicate between them requires a deeper inquiryinto the figure of Socrates.

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Duchamp's Mischief