The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic Revolution

Author(s): Steven Goldsmith

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), pp.
197-208
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430663
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 STEVEN GOLDSMITH
The Readymades of Marcel
Duchamp: The Ambiguities of
Aesthetic Revolution
THE EFFORT of philosophers in the 1950s
to demonstrate, following Wittgenstein's
theory of open concepts, that art could
not be defined has not hindered some
contemporary aestheticians from making
the attempt. At the heart of such discus-
sions, at least in the visual arts, lie Mar-
cel Duchamp's readymades, which more
than any other experiment has challenged
the boundaries and even the foundations
of art as a concept. In the second decade
of this century, Duchamp selected
commonplace objects, including a urinal
provocatively entitled Fountain, and
shook the art world by exhibiting them,
often physically unaltered except for the
appearance of the artist's signature, on
pedestals in museums. After the initial re-
actions of laughter or disgust, the ready-
mades held their status as artworks, usu-
ally categorized as sculpture, and since
have become the central hurdle over
which any attempt to define art must leap.
Not only did the readymades find their
way into permanent museum collections,
but they solidified their position in the
academic history of art by crucially influ-
encing later developments. Without Du-
champ's experiments it is likely that the
Pop Art celebration of everyday objects
or the current profusion of "junk" sculp-
ture might never have occurred. In any
case, such vigorous movements have
helped theorists perceive the inadequacies
of traditional criteria for art, such as imi-
tation or expression, and have encour-
STEVEN GOLDSMITH teaches English at the
University of Pennsylvania.
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an
aged them either to abandon definition
altogether or pursue it in some other
direction.
The attempt to define anything is by na-
ture a conservative activity. Conceptual
definitions are necessarily exclusive; they
focus on particular, selected characteris-
tics at the expense of actual uniqueness or
diversity. They allow us to order our ex-
perience by grouping certain things to-
gether and leaving others out. If Marcel
Duchamp presents an object that radically
questions the borders of any definition of
art, an object that cannot be ignored be-
cause it has been accepted in practice as
as art, the conservative critic seeks to
enlarge the borders of theory and thus ab-
sorb the rebellion. While the peculiar, ir-
resolvable nature of the readymade threat-
ens to undermine this endeavor with the
assertion that everything (or, of course,
nothing) is art, it also surprisingly helps to
further the conventional cause. The
strange paradox embodied in the ready-
made is that, depending on the interpreta-
tion one accords it, the object can support
the extremes of both anarchist and
staunchly conservative theories of art.
The split impulses, I believe, can be
traced back to Duchamp's own enigmatic
writing, where he is at once a self-pro-
claimed iconoclast and a preserver of the
most oppressive strain of traditional aes-
thetic value. The conservative interpreta-
tion of the readymade, supplied in part by
Duchamp himself, has allowed the pro-
ponents of the Institutional Theory of
Art, today's leading candidate for a defini-
tion of art, to overcome the Dada ob-
Copyright © 1983, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism
198 GOLDSMITH

stacle and to proceed once again in the di- ever-changing phenomenon, is uncertain.
rection of secure categorization. At times Duchamp openly considered
To some extent, our historical asso- himself a member, yet he would fre-
ciation of Duchamp with Dada has tended to quently assert his independence as well.
blur the artist's curiously mixed impulses. Clearly, the above attack on bourgeois
His conventional side becomes lost in the "intellectualism" and "ideas' contradicts
flurry of Dada slogans such as the following, the thrust of much of Duchamp's art,
devoted to revolution: which he continuously acknowledged to
be primarily literary and intellectual. The
Dada readymades, closest to the Dada spirit of
revolution in their deliberate attempt to
stands on shake the conventions of the art institu-
tion, can become the vehicles of either
the side of the revolutionary aesthetic egalitarianism or elitism, de-
pending mainly on whether they are per-
Proletariat ceived formally or conceptually, through
the theoretical eyes of Aristotle or Plato.
Open up at last As an intriguing physical presence, the
readymade destroys the framework of art.
your head Put simply, if a toilet or a bottlerack can
provide rewarding formal statisfaction,
Leave it free anything can. Art, as a privileged, isolated
category, no longer exists. As a vehicle
for the for the communication of ideas, however,
the readymade reaffirms the traditional art
demands of our age world. The found object is art because an
artist of special sensibility felt he could
Down with art convey an important aesthetic idea
through it. As a carrier of meaning, the
Down with readymade stands apart from what Arthur
Danto calls "mere real things."2 Before
bourgeois intellectualism considering the conservative conceptual
approach to the readymade I will first
Art is dead establish the antithetical and radical impli-
cations of the formalist position.
Long live The formal principle behind the ready-
made is far from revolutionary and hark-
the machine art ens back to Kant's notion of disinterest-
edness. Wrench a common object from its
of Tatlin functional environment, eliminate its po-
tential for practical use, set it upon a
Dada stand like objects traditionally devoted to
aesthetic scrutiny, and the formal design
is the previously obscured in the object is
thrown into the forefront of consideration.
voluntary destruction Without the film of familiarity that hinders
us from seeing beyond its' function, a
of the urinal can become a highly polished,
gleaming artwork that combines masculine
bourgeois world of ideas' piping with rounded feminine curves-not
unlike the androgenous figures created
The degree of Duchamp's participation in by Henry Moore. Unnoticed details sur-
the Dada movement, itself a nebulous and face with the encouragement of closer

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The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
examination. Hung upside down and sus-
pended from the ceiling, The Bottlerack
cannot possibly be appreciated as a tool
for drying bottles.3 Yet the strangeness of
its form-the threatening protrusion of
metal spikes layered symmetrically along
a conical shape-suddenly becomes
apparent.
Such an interpretation of the readymade
can, but does not necessarily, lead to the
revolutionary panaestheticism that Muk-
arovsky hinted at and feared. Formalism
has often proved a most conservative en-
terprise which in no way sanctions the be-
lief that anything and everything can be
art. The New Critics sought rather to iso-
late literature from nonartistic phenom-
ena, to award it special "aesthetic" sta-
tus, much as Clive Bell privileged painting
through "significant form." Formalism
can become a type of puritanism where
disinterested formal scrutiny permits an
object to transcend the vulgar world of
use and change. Clement Greenberg dis-
cussed the importance of abstract art in
exactly this way. The avant-garde artist
strives to achieve the full formal potential
of his medium and thus arrives at an im-
mutable absolute that divorces high
culture from the transient and degraded
public culture.
Hence it developed that the true and most im-
portant function of the avant-garde was not to
"experiment," but to find a path along which it
would be possible to keep culture moving in the
midst of ideological confusion and violence.
Retiring from the public altogether, the avant-
garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high
level of his art by both narrowing it and raising
it to the expression of an absolute in which all
relativities and contradictiors would be either re-
solved or beside the point. "Art for art's sake"
and "pure poetry" appear and subject matter or
content becomes something to be avoided like
the plague.4
Even confronting the readymades, these
most banal objects, a formalist need not
forsake the distinction he desires between
art and the common world. Instead of
seeing that all objects share in potential
the special "aesthetic" quality usually as-
cribed only to works in a museum, he
marvels at the thought that a few common
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199
objects have been elevated to the stature
of artworks. Hence Danto calls his book-
length explanation of the readymades and
the Pop artifacts they inspired The Trans-
figuration of the Commonplace. He
praises Duchamp, "who first performed
the subtle miracle of transforming, into
works of art, objects from the Lebenswelt
of commonplace existence."5 The
"miracle" metaphor tips off Danto's
strategy; he is willing to allow that the
urinal or bottlerack is art only because
they have crossed some mystical border-
line where they shed their existence as
"mere real things." For Danto, as we
shall see later, the readymade ironically
makes clear the distance between art and
the commonplace.
Of course, it is actually impossible to
tell which concept moves in which direc-
tion. Do common objects rise to art, or
does art fall to the everyday? Duchamp
considered the possibility of a reverse
readymade, a Rembrandt used as an iron-
ing board. He also drew a mustache on a
reproduction of the Mona Lisa, presum-
ably to demonstrate that academic art was
not sacred, at least no more sacred than
a properly displayed urinal. Jack Burn-
ham, inverting Danto's contention that
the readymades were somehow elevated,
claims that Duchamp's cult "sought to
denigrate sculpture to the status of mun-
dane object."6 Pushed to its most radical
implication, Duchamp's experiment abo-
lishes the line between art and anything
else, rendering art a useless and arbitrary
label. All objects become works of art,
just as all works of art become not-so-ex-
traordinary objects. If you observe a
urinal in a museum and realize its formal
potential as art, a formal potential no dif-
ferent from that of a Brancusi or a
Moore, there is nothing to stop you from
regarding an identical urinal in the Van
Pelt Library as art. The application of the
formal principle is unlimited. If a urinal,
why not a doorknob? As you leave the
Van Pelt bathroom, stop for a moment
before the door and consider the knob's
sensuous curve, the muted hue of its
brass, the intricate network of scratches
that line its surface. Capable of such ex-
200
tended application, Duchamp's ready-
mades suggest the following revolutionary
consequences. As Arturo Schwarz puts it,
First of all the difference between the artist and
the layman ceases to exist, and every man is en-
dowed with the faculty of creating beauty (In the
case of the Ready-mades, simply by deciding
that a common object is to be elevated to the
status of a work of art). And secondly, the very
distinction between life and art is abolished.7
Duchamp throws into doubt the two con-
cepts upon which the traditional humanist
sanction of art rests-the special "aes-
thetic" quality of the artwork and the spe-
cial sensibility of the artist. The total ega-
litarianism that results, a democracy of
both people and objects, threatens the
conventional order of social and aesthetic
hierarchy. Morse Peckham, arriving at
similar conclusions in his effort to explode
accepted theories of art, writes, "The dis-
covery that anything becomes a work of
art if you perceive it as a work of art, and
that it can be given public status if you
place it in an artistic situation, is, accord-
ing to some critics and a concerned pub-
lic, fraught with danger for art."8
As I have suggested, one way to side-
step the danger posed by the readymade
is to deny or minimize its formal potential
in favor of its symbolic or intellectual po-
tential. In his recent article, Karsten Har-
ries proposes that Duchamp's found ob-
jects have reinforced the mainstream of
academic modern art precisely because
they subordinate form to concept. The
importance of the urinal, for instance, lies
outside the object's physical presence.
The aesthetic appeal of the object is very lim-
ited; it gains its meaning only as a gesture di-
rected against the established and the accepted.
Duchamp himself spoke of provocation. The
title, so obviously at odds with what it names,
underscores the provocation.
Capturing the paradox that Fountain com-
bines revolutionary intentions with some
surprisingly traditional tendencies, he
goes on to write,
Like so much modern art, it is first of all art
about art. ... What matters is not the concrete
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GOLDSMITH
object, but the fact that it has been chosen and
the idea governing that choice. . . . That Du-
champ's challenge failed to break the rule of the
artistic approach is clear, in retrospect. Objects
created to provoke and scandalize were soon
canonized and collected.9
Fountain is important not as a "concrete
object" that levels and demystifies "aes-
thetic" appeal, but as a "gesture" or
"idea." Rather than destroying institu-
tional art, it has fathered a long line of
conceptual pieces that promote philosoph-
ical inquiry in the scholastic tradition-
complex, self-explorative pieces that
question the very nature of their own ex-
istence as art. The layman claims that
anyone could exhibit a urinal on a ped-
estal, but the artist did it and did it for a
reason. This reason becomes the essential
distinguishing factor; the readymade is
more that a physical object; it has qual-
ities inaccessible to the senses. It can be
"daring, impudent, irreverent, witty and
clever,"10 all of which, according to
Danto, a commonplace, utilitarian object
cannot be. Endorsing his work with mean-
ing, creating a statement about art, the
artist works within a traditional context of
aesthetic theory and perpetuates that con-
text. Meanwhile, by shifting the grounds
from form to concept, the conservative
has succeeded in maintaining the privi-
leged status of both the artist, who had
the delicacy of insight to make such an
experiment, and the object, which is capa-
ble of provoking an intellectual interpreta-
tion in ways that a "mere real thing'
cannot.
Although one might be tempted to think
otherwise, the conceptual approach to the
readymade does not comprise a bourgeois
adulteration of Duchamp's revolutionary
intentions. Rather, its roots lie in the ar-
tist's own theories. A clear indication of
his antithetical impulses appears in a
prose piece written in 1946 to explain his
painting of the period just prior to the
readymade experiments. Fully aware of
his radical inclinations, Duchamp vehe-
mently asserts that he did not want to be
a "slave to landmarks."1 He found him-
self attracted to Dada mainly because it
was "serviceable as a purgative' 12-a

The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
means of breaking free from a stuffy and
restrictive academic institution. Yet the
contradictory crux of Duchamp's state-
ment is an affirmation of traditional,
transcendent aesthetic value; as Harries
contends, he sees his work "as an at-
tempt to restore to painting its literary di-
mension, to lead it back to the tradition it
had forsaken."13 For Duchamp, that tra-
dition is specifically religious, or at least
spiritual, and painting becomes important
to him as it moves away from the physical
toward the mental. He writes,
I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of
painting. I was much more interest in recreating
ideas in painting ... For me Courbet had intro-
duced the physical emphasis in the nineteenth
century. I was interested in ideas-not merely in
visual products. I wanted to put painting once
again at the service of the mind. And my paint-
ing was, of course, at once regarded as "intellec-
tual," "literary" painting.14
"Reduce, reduce, reduce,' 15 he states
emphatically, meaning that the physical
nature of painting, the heavy impasto
characteristic of the realist or impres-
sionist's indulgence in the medium, should
be eliminated in favor of the unconta-
minated value of mystical and ineffable
ideas. Several of Duchamp's statements
express a blatant puritanism, that art
should be the embodiment of spirit, and
the less body the better.
Dada was an extreme protest against the
physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical
attitude. 16
Or,
This is the direction in which art should turn: to
an intellectual expression, rather than to an ani-
mal expression. 17
The apparent disgust with the physical;
the belief that art can provide a haven un-
touched by animal limitation; the evoca-
tion of a mysterious metaphysics upon
which traditional aesthetic value has de-
pended since the romantics and earlier-
all of these elements indicate the rebel's
remarkably conservative disposition.
Duchamp's attitude toward painting
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201
carries over to the readymades which im-
mediately followed. In an interview with
Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp discusses how
he selected the objects to be exhibited,
claiming that "you have to approach
something with indifference, as if you had
no aesthetic emotion. The choice of
readymades is always based on visual in-
difference and, at the same time, on the
total absence of good or bad taste.'18 In
this light the motivation behind the ready-
made is no different from that of the ear-
lier paintings. Having obliterated the
physical influence of the senses and the
cultural influence of "good or bad taste,"
presumably the artist is left in a mental
state pure and intellectual. He puts the
found object "at the service of the mind";
the fact that it has been chosen and now
bears the meaning of an idea triumphs
over its ordinary physical presence. The
readymade that so threatens to pull high
culture from its ivory tower and down to
the level of the local restroom, falls prey
to the same unwarranted assumptions that
traditionally sustain high culture. The
readymade consoles the curator who dis-
plays the disturbing piece with the two
age-old humanist adages: art is timeless
(bound to "mind" and not to an era's
contingencies) and art reflects an underly-
ing human denominator that is universal
because it remains free from diverse ex-
ternal influences. Aside from the rhetoric
of disinterestedness, there is little reason
to believe that the artist is capable of
stepping out of history, stripping away the
physical and cultural contingencies that
shape human vision, or even that some
intellectual essence would remain after
such a process. Duchamp's theory is
romantic in high Kantian fashion, seeking
the permanent spiritual value exempt from
all transient influence, a value that must
always be a dubious postulate. Yet it is
the evocation of this suspiciously conven-
tional value that permits the conservative
aesthetician to avoid the formalist implica-
tions of the readymade and to focus on its
conceptual potential instead.
In one sense, the readymade becomes
the perfect vehicle of pure idea-it in-
volves no physical construction. The art-
202
ist never gets his hands dirty and pro-
duces a work of art through a sheer act of
will. "Part of the irony of the 'Ready-
mades," Burnham asserts, "is their very
idealism-a consequence of being all idea
with no deliberate construction technique
on the part of the artist."19 Again, such a
consideration leads us away from a for-
malist interpretation and back to a con-
ceptual one. Duchamp himself writes that
the readymade allowed him to "reduce
the idea of aesthetic consideration to the
choice of the mind, not to the ability or
cleverness of the hand [he] objected to in
many paintings of [his] generation.'20 An-
ticipating Danto's belief that the com-
mon object is elevated to the status of art
and not vice versa, Duchamp claims that
he took the objects "out of the earth"
and placed them "onto the planet of
aesthetics.''21 While Duchamp's phrase
rings with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, the
opposition between a higher aesthetic
realm and a lower earthy realm conforms
to his notion of pure idea and animal
body. The difference between a urinal in
the museum's bathroom and a urinal in
the museum's modern sculpture gallery is
that the latter possesses a hidden essence
of aesthetic idea and meaning the former
entirely lacks. Moreover, the artist has
created that idea without any dependence
upon vulgar, physical means.
The particular dilemma of the ready-
made is that it confirms the most oppres-
sively conservative formulation of aesthet-
ic theory while it explodes all attempts to
contain art within clearly defined bound-
aries. At the same time that he felt he was
placing objects on that exclusive "planet
of aesthetics," Duchamp also stressed
that the readymades "weren't works of
art"; they were objects "to which no art
terms applied.22 Despite such claims,
and an undeniable interest in disrupting
bourgeois sensibility, Duchamp certainly
treated his readymades like artworks. If
the readymade was intended to liberate
the aesthetic nature of all objects, it is
hard to see why Duchamp early on de-
cided to limit the number he would pro-
duce. Only when they are seen as tradi-
tional artworks fraught with meaning can
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GOLDSMITH
we understand his refusal to indulge in in-
discriminate production. "I wanted to
protect my Ready-mades," he said,
"against such a contamination."23 Sim-
ilarly, after many of the original pieces
were lost, why did Duchamp supervise
the 1964 reproduction of "a signed and
numbered edition of his most important
Readymades"24 The appearance of these
late replicas, and even tJie notion that the
objects could be ranked in importance,
suggests that Duchamp, at least in prac-
tice, did indeed consider his readymades
artworks in a quite conventional fashion.
If the above activities serve to affirm
the privileged nature of the aesthetic ob-
ject, they also affirm the special role of
the artist who created and preserved
them. Herschel B. Chipp's praise of Du-
champ is typical of the retrospective as-
sessment that perceives the readymade
primarily as conceptual art.
Duchamp actually produced very little-a few
paintings, drawings and fragmentary writings-
yet his superior intellegence and refined sensibil-
ity provided a wealth of associated meanings for
each of his works, even when, as with the
"Ready-mades," he did nothing to the object ex-
cept to present it for contemplation.25
The attribution of "superior intelligence
and refined sensibility" neatly embeds
Duchamp in a tradition that sets the art-
ist, in degree if not kind, above the mass
of men. If the readymades possess an
egalitarian impulse, that impulse is easily
lost; does Fountain suggest that any man
can create beauty simply by cleansing his
doors of perception, or does it celebrate
the exclusive power of the artist's pene-
trating creativity? Frank Lentricchia aptly
summarizes the central paradox that has
evolved historically out of contradictory
romantic motives.
For all of its demystifying and democratic pre-
dispositions toward matters social and aesthetic,
at the center of romantic thought there is also
(as Harold Bloom has not yet tired of telling us)
a powerful elitism. This elitism, put forward in
the guises of creative genius and various other
ideals of originality, would claim that artistic ac-
tivity-by definition something that artists alone
may engage in-is the most deeply humanizing
activity; the difficulty is that "we." mankind at
 The Readym cdes of Marcel Duchamp
large, we nonartists, are by this reckoning ex-
cluded from the community of the most human
sorts of beings.26
Does Fountain imply that the artist can
see in a urinal what will forever remain
beyond the intellectual grasp of nonartis-
tic man? In an almost perverse reversal of
their power to unsettle-their power to
produce the initial shock that must inevi-
tably overwhelm the museum-goer who,
having just seen a Rembrandt, suddenly
confronts a urinal displayed on equal
terms-the readymades forfeit their anar-
chist provocation. They become, under
the light of the conservative theory Du-
champ himself fosters, "touchstones"27
for the conventional aesthetic hierarchy.
Perhaps, in presenting the conservative
side of Duchamp's readymades, I have
relied too heavily upon the artist's pro-
fessed intentions which, after all, carry no
more weight than any other interpretation.
Moreover, it is impossible to determine
how closely Duchamp's statements, all
made years after the fact, match the
original sentiment with which he first
exhibited the found objects. The state-
ments always remain playfully enigmatic,
but they possess that aura of intellectu-
alizing that tends to dampen the initial
dynamics of real artistic innovation. In a
way, the readymades resemble the avant-
garde painting of Picasso and Braque-in
the assessment of the many forces that
brought forth cubism, one thing is certain;
it did not rise out of any clearly formu-
lated doctrine. Only years later, well after
critics like Apollinaire began to theorize,
did Braque finally produce statements that
supported the established academic ap-
praisal. Picasso never spoke on the sub-
ject. Xavier Rubert de Ventos claims that
the artist, as creator and not as critic, al-
ways strives to develop an expression that
escapes the current critical vocabulary.
Revolution in the arts, he says, is "neces-
sary for things to get outside their 'defini-
tions,' so that theorists of art or society
would be forced to get rid of their ideolo-
gical 'gadgets,' "28 Yet the most fierce re-
bellions eventually become old news and
soon supply the ideological gadgetry that
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203
binds the next generation. Even the artist,
looking back on the works that stunned
the art world, may be susceptible to the
theorizing that attempts to bring intellec-
tual order to history.
In any case, I have emphasized Du-
champ's stated position on his ready-
mades because of its fundamental similar-
ity to the contemporary efforts to define
aesthetics that have loosely organized
themselves around the Institutional The-
ory of Art. As Howard Becker notes in
his closely related study, this theory
marks, as most theories do, "the develop-
ment of a new aesthetic to take account
of work the art world has already
accepted' 29-meaning the readymades
and the subsequent Pop artifacts that
have firmly established themselves in mu-
seum culture. Arthur Danto and George
Dickie, the philosophers who sport the
two leading, and considerably different,
versions of the theory, both pursue the
same goal: uncover the elusive definition
of art that so many others had declared
nonexistent.30 In order to do so, they
each confront Duchamp and absorb him
into their theories by asserting precisely
what the artist himself asserted, that the
essence of the artwork lies outside the
physical object in unseen qualities. In
their quest to find the invisible character-
istics that inherently unite Fountain and
the works of the old masters under the
single category of art, both philosophers
rely primarily upon a conceptual interpre-
tation of the readymades and display the
same sort of conservative aesthetic im-
pulse that accompanied the conceptual ap-
proach in Duchamp's later writing.
Although he did not provide its name
and continues to disagree with Dickie's
formulation of it, Danto originated the In-
stitutional Theory of Art in a 1964 article
where he made a now-famous claim. "To
see something as art," he wrote, "re-
quires something the eye cannot descry-
an atmosphere of theory, a knowledge of
the history of art: an artworld."3' In
Dickie's later interpretation of this state-
ment, the "artworld" becomes the inter-
actions of a social organization. For
Danto, however, whose approach has not
204
changed since the early piece,32 the "art-
world" means the conceptual or philo-
sophical basis of art that transcends its
physical dimension. He is the first to
admit that on an "aesthetic" or formal
level, "the distinction between artworks
and mere things is inscrutable."33 There-
fore, in order to maintain that distinction
and prevent art from losing its privileged
status, Danto shifts the defining aesthetic
characteristics away from the physical
and more toward the mental. In an earlier
article with the same title as his recent
book, "The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace," Danto compares a sim-
ple wood crate to an identical object con-
structed (or selected) by an artist. The
first is truly empty, but the second con-
tains something-its "content is the con-
cept of art.'34 Detached from the real
world, the second artifact, as Danto puts
it, belongs to "a world of interpreted
things." 35
Not unlike Duchamp's planet of aes-
thetics, this world of interpreted things
exists as an objectively isolated realm. Its
objects remain distinct from identical
mere real things not because of someone's
subjective categorization of them, but be-
cause of inherent qualities-namely, the
ability to carry aesthetic meaning-in
those objects. Learning that an object is a
work of art, Danto tells us, "means that
it has qualities to attend to which its un-
transfigured counterpart lacks, and that
our aesthetic responses will be different.
And this is not institutional, it is ontologi-
cal. We are dealing with an altogether dif-
ferent order of things."36 As we have
seen, the attribution of special ontological
(and empirically unverifiable) status to
artworks represents the most oppressively
conservative aesthetic theory; it immedi-
ately shuts the door on revolution and
even speculation. If interpretability is the
decisive criterion for art, I see no reason
why it is inconceivable that someone
could find meaning, formal or philosoph-
ical, in any urinal, or conversely, why a
perfectly intelligent and educated mu-
seum-goer might be incapable of finding
any meaning whatsoever in Duchamp's
Fountain. Yet Danto wants to cut off the
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GOT DSMITH
possibilities at both ends, declaring once
and for all that one object is intrinsically
art and the other is not.
Despite his humanist intentions, Danto
suffers from an almost tyrannical ideal-
ism. Art, under his conceptual theory, be-
comes the exclusive intellectual property
of those adequate to perceive its inherent
spirit. Danto entirely misses the influence
of his own subjective perspective; it is no
coincidence that the philosopher believes
theory to be art's foremost quality and
consequently privileges art's theoretical
nature. In a revealing passage, Danto
states of certain Pop paintings by
Lichtenstein,
These paintings are deeply theoretical works,
self-conscious to such a degree that it is difficult
to know how much of the material correlate
must be reckoned in as part of the artwork; so
self-conscious are they, indeed, that they almost
exemplify a Hegelian ideal in which matter is
transfigured into spirit, in this case there being
hardly an element of the material counterpart
which may not be a candidate for an element in
the artwork itself.37
For Danto, objects become art to the de-
gree that their physical nature dissolves
into pure philosophical idea, and he falls
prey to that Hegelian puritanism which in-
sists that the body and all of its con-
tingencies must be transcended as art
evolves into spirit. To place the essence
of art in theory is to cut off most people
from art and to perpetuate an elite acad-
emy. Aesthetic essence lies open only to
those scholarly few who have the theoretical
knowledge to penetrate it.
Another reference to Hegel clearly lo-
cates Danto in a line of conventionally
exclusive romanticism that oppresses as it
purports to liberate. Setting out his inten-
tions in the book's preface, Danto strives
to discover the defining characteristics of
art that elevate it above the whirling tran-
siency of the mundane-the permanent
center of theory exempt from the influ-
ence of earthly change. In order to do so,
he knows that he must account for the
endless cycles of revolution that comprise
the history of art, especially the recent
movements initiated by Duchamp that
seem to defy the very barrier between art
The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
and that chaos of common things. Speak-
ing of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, a con-
troversial Pop "sculpture" rendered as
close to the commercial packaging as pos-
sible, Danto somewhat defensively writes,
Any definition that is going to stand up has ac-
cordingly to indemnify itself against such revolu-
tions, and I should like to believe with the Brillo
Boxes the possibilities are effectively closed and
that the history of art has come, in a way, to an
end. It has not stopped but ended, in the sense
that it has passed into a kind of consciousness of
itself and become, again in a way, its own phi-
losophy: a state of affairs predicted by Hegel.38
Danto wants a definition that will stand
invulnerable to revolution, that will ab-
sorb all potential diversity into its univer-
sal rule. Almost frightening in its implica-
tions, the passage suggests a not un-
common desire for stability and order, a
desire for some sense of direction and
progression that overcomes decay, but at
the crucial expense of vitality. History as
a living process of change must yield to
the revelation of the pure mind's immuta-
ble self-consciousness; history must cease
its motion. Yet even more disturbing than
the comprehensible quest for permanence
is what Danto places in the privileged
aesthetic center: philosophical self-
awareness. Perhaps for the philosopher
the development of aesthetics has some-
how come to an end (not stopped, of
course) with the self-questioning nature of
modem art, but Danto tells us throughout
his book that this view is rooted in the
very ontology of art. Either we accept
that art is concept and theory, and the
consequent belief that modern art ter-
minally culminates an intellectual progres-
sion Danto associates with a Hegelian
view of the universe, or we are simply
wrong.
Danto's version of the Institutional
Theory of Art lies closest to Duchamp's
conception of aesthetics and is more
conservative than Dickie's. Yet it is
Dickie, influenced by the growing empha-
sis on sociology in aesthetics, who formu-
lates a clear, though endlessly problema-
tic, defintion of art.
A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an
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205
artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had
conferred upon it the status of candidate for ap-
preciation by some person or persons acting on
behalf of a certain institution (the artworld).39
As with Danto, the physical character-
istics of an object are relatively unim-
portant to Dickie, though he locates the
essence of art not in theory but in an
unseen social framework. Art becomes the
product of a certain type of social behav-
ior. "When I call the artworld an institu-
tion," Dickie writes, "I am saying that it
is an established practice."40 He never
makes explicit, however, whether this
"established practice" is universal to
mankind or particular to a certain cultural
group and his failure to specify the defini-
tion marks one of its chief weaknesses.
While avoiding the issue of cultural diver-
sity--"It would be enough to be able to
specify the necessary and sufficient condi-
tions for the concept of art which we
have'41 (whoever "we" are)-Dickie in-
sists that his description of the art world
defines art without falling into the conser-
vative aesthetic ideology that has hand-
cuffed creativity in the past. Of the many
problems involved with a definition that
seeks to maintain complete artistic free-
dom as it imposes limits on the nature of
art, I will briefly focus on a few consider-
ations relevant to Duchamp and the
readymades.
Like Danto, Dickie makes the perplex-
ing readymade the central example of his
theory, claiming that "Dadaism . . . most
easily reveals the institutional essence of
art."42 The importance he sees in the
readymade is that it brings out an "estab-
lished practice" of the art world that was
previously unnoticed-the conferring of
the status of art upon an object. Accord-
ing to Dickie, this behavior always consti-
tuted a social criterion for art, but in tra-
ditional aesthetics it was accepted without
question. In the act of painting or sculpt-
ing the artist automatically conferred the
status of art upon his creation. "When,
however, the objects are bizarre," Dickie
tells us,
as those of the Dadaists are, our attention is
forced away from the objects' obvious properties
206
to a consideration of the objects in their social
context. As works of art Duchamp's 'ready-
mades' may not be worth much, but as examples
of art they are very valuable for art theory.43
Once again we see the critic shift away
from a formal interpretation of the ready-
made to a conceptual one, absorbing the
work into a realm of theory (here, social
theory) that subordinates its revolutionary
impulse. Danto uses Duchamp to confirm
the ongoing philosophical framework of
art by focusing on the theoretical implica-
tions of the readymades; Dickie uses him
to confirm a perpetual social framework
of art in like manner. "I am not claiMn-
ing," he writes, "that Duchamp and
friends invented the conferring of the sta-
tus of art; they simply used an existing
institutional device in an unusual way.
Duchamp did not invent the artworld, be-
cause it was there all along."44 Although
their art worlds are different, both Dickie
and Danto seek the underlying institution-
al substratum that unites the diverse array
of artworks of all eras and keeps them
distinct from nonartistic objects.
On the surface, Dickie's social ap-
proach seems to provide a definition that
leaves open the possibilities of art in a
way that philosophers like Weitz and
Kennick thought impossible. Liberal
claims such as the following permeate his
writing:
Since under the definition anything whatever
may become art, the definition imposes no re-
straints on creativity.45
In addition, every person who sees himself as a
member of the artworld is thereby a member.46
Dickie attempts to avoid the exclusive
elitism which developed out of previous
definitions of art that posited some privi-
leged "aesthetic" quality as the disting-
uishing criterion. Here, anything can be
art and anyone can act as artist. But as
William Blizek acutely observes, Dickie
implies throughout that the art world is
more limited than his definition ideally
suggests.47 For instance, who actual-
ly comprises the art world and confers
the status of art upon objects? Dickie
responds,
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GOLDSMITH
The core personnel of the artworld is a loosely
organized, but nevertheless related, set of per-
sons including artists (understood to refer to
painters, writers, composers), producers, mu-
seum directors, museum-goers, theater-goers, re-
porters for newspapers, critics for publications
of all sorts, art historians, art theorists, philo-
sophers of art, and others. These are the people
who keep the machinery of the artworld working
and thereby provide for its continuing existence.
. . . Although I have called the persons just
listed the core personnel of the artworld, there is
a minimum core within that core without which
the artworld would not exist.48
Cores within cores-the art world is
clearly composed of a social hierarchy
that distinguishes status between mem-
bers. While anyone may become a mem-
ber simply be seeing himself as one, it
does not necessarily allow him to enter
the inner circle and share in the power en-
joyed there.
Furthermore, can anyone actually act
on behalf of the art world? In his study of
the art institution, Becker demonstrates
that Dickie's theoretical egalitarianism,
supposedly based on "established prac-
tice," proves an illusion in reality. "A rel-
evant feature of art worlds," he writes,
"is that, however their position is justi-
fied, some people are commonly seen by
many or most interested parties as more
entitled to speak on behalf of the art
world than others."49 In other words,
Duchamp could display an unaltered
urinal in a museum because he had al-
ready established his status as an artist in
the art world. In a revealing section,
Dickie indicates that he too subscribes to
the principle of social-aesthetic hierarchy
that reinforces the privileged position of
the artist in a traditional romantic manner.
Comparing a salesman who displays
commonplace wares before a customer
and Duchamp who converts common-
place artifacts into art, both of whom
offer their objects "for appreciation,"
Dickie explains that the commercial
goods are not art because the salesman
does not perceive himself as acting on be-
half of the art world. Of course, he could,
like Duchamp, transform them into art-
works, "but such a thing probably would
not occur to him."'5 The artist retains his
The Readymandes of Marcel Duchamp
position in the "minimum core" of the art
world, his special sensibility distinguishing
him from salesmen and other men.
Finally, we must ask what it means to
act on behalf of the art world. If one as-
pect of the readymade's effect is to dis-
turb or perhaps even destroy the sacred
notion of institutional art, can we right-
fully say that Duchamp was acting on be-
half of the art world? True, the found ob-
jects can be interpreted as art about art,
but as we have seen, their self-reflection
is meant, at least in part, to refute the
very concept of art; they work within a
social or theoretical context only to un-
dermine that context. Dickie avoids the
deconstructive tendency of the readymade
by focusing interpretation on the social
behavior it exemplifies and conservatively
perpetuates, but at the expense of other
implications. The readymade is important
for one reason only; it demonstrates the
conferring of the status of art. The self-
destructive meaning that it carries as a
conceptual vehicle and the leveling poten-
tial of its formal dimension are entirely ig-
nored. The "open" definition of art based
on social relationships becomes as limiting
as any other definition, suggesting the
necessarily conservative nature of the
critic who partakes in the defining
process.
As its name implies, the Institutional
Theory of Art, in Danto's or Dickie's for-
mulation, marks a conservative effort to
organize the aesthetic experience that is
at least confusingly diverse and perhaps
outright chaotic. Both versions of the the-
ory limit the range of our responses to art
by selecting a single characteristic as the
decisive classifying criterion. Both ver-
sions manage to account for the Duchamp
readymade in a way that reinforces an al-
ready present institution and excludes the
revolutionary potential that would disrupt
that institution. Yet the many sides of the
readymade that are ignored or suppressed
act as testimony against the possibility of
aesthetic definition. No matter what type
of approach one takes, the readymade has
a paradoxical alternative that refutes the
approach. If one sanctions its conceptual
nature and thus hopes to continue a tradi-
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207
tional history of aesthetic philosophy, one
must confront the deconstructive quality
of the idea it carries, an idea that denies
precisely the desired traditional history. If
one sanctions the readymade's social na-
ture, one must confront its leveling formal
potential that renders social context negli-
gible. It is not mandatory to act on behalf
of the art world to find formal satisfaction
in any urinal. And finally, sanctioning the
formal approach does not necessarily lead
to revolutionary equality among all ob-
jects and people. As we have seen, it is
just as possible that this mere real thing,
this urinal or bottlerack, has been trans-
figured by a special mind into the elite
realm of art. No matter what he intended
with his experiment, Duchamp created a
Chinese box of unaccountable paradoxes.
Like Keats' Urn, the readymade teases us
out of thought. For whatever explanation
or interpretation we can propose, it al-
ways sports a contradictory answer, leav-
ing an elusive portion of itself outside the
boundaries of any definition of art.
Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art,
(University of California Press, 1968), p. 376.
2 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981).
The phrase comes from the title of the book's first
chapter, "Works of Art and Mere Real Things."
3 The Bottlerack was orginally meant to be dis-
played in this manner. See Arturo Schwarz, The
Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York,
1969), p. 31.
4 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston,
1961), p. 5.
5 Danto, p. vi.
6 Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New
York, 1968), p. 30.
7 Schwarz, p. 41.
8 Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos (New
York, 1965), p. 69.
9 Karsten Harries, "The Painter and the Word,"
Bennington Review, 13 (1982), 24.
10 Danto, pp. 93-4.
i Chipp, p. 394.
12 Ibid.
13 Harries, 20.
14 Chipp, pp. 393-4.
1i Ibid., p. 393.
16 Ibid., p. 394.
17 Ibid., p. 395.
18 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Du-
champ (New York, 1971), p. 48.
19 Burham, p. 29.
20 Ann D'Harnoncourt, Marcel Duchamp (New
208 GOLDSMITH

York: The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia 33 Danto, p. 30.

Museum of Art, 1973), p. 275. 34 Danto, "The Transfiguration of the Common-
21 Ibid., pp. 275-6. place," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
22 Cabanne, p. 48. XXXIII, no. 11 (1974), 148.
23 Schwarz, p. 45. 35 Danto, The Transfiguration of the Common-
24 Ibid., p. 449. place, p. 35.
25 Chipp, p. 368. 36 Ibid., p. 99.
26 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism 37Ibid., p. 111.
(University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 216-17. 38 Ibid., p. vii.
27 Chipp, p. 368. 39 George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Insti-
28 Xavier Rubert de Ventos, Heresies of Modern tutional Analysis (Corell University Press, 1974), p.
Art (Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 5. 34.
29 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (University of Cali- 40 Dickie, p. 31.
fornia Press, 1982), p. 145. 41 Ibid., p. 28.
30 Two central articles in the effort to deny the de- 42 Ibid., p. 32.
finability of art are Morris Weitz, "The Role of The- 43 Ibid., pp. 32-3.
ory in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art 44 Ibid., p. 33.
Criticism, XV, no. I (1956), 27-35, and William E. 45 Ibid., p. 49.
Kennick, "Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest On a 46 Ibid., p. 36.
Mistake," Mind, 67, no. 267 (1958), 317-34. 47 William Blizek, "An Institutional Theory of
31 Danto, "The Artworld." Journal of Philosophy, Art," British Journal of Aesthetics, 14 (1974), 146.
61 (1964), 580. 48 Dickie, pp. 35-6.
32 Danto repeats the above phrase almost verba- 49 Becker, p. 151.
tim on page 135 of the 1981 Transfiguration of the 50 Dickie, p. 38.
Commonplace.

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