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A new interpretation of the reception and legacy of Marcel Duchamp's controversial Fountain.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent a “telegram” in the form of a urinal signed “R. Mutt.” When it arrived at its destination forty years later, it was both celebrated and vilified for proclaiming that anything could be art. From, that moment on, the entire Western art world was reconfigured as “Post-Duchamp.”

This new work from celebrated art historian and philosopher Thierry de Duve marks the completion of his decades-long effort to understand how Duchamp's Fountain marked a turning point in art history and to resolve the unprecedented problems this piece poses for philosophical aesthetics. Beyond shedding new light on the piece's initial reception and correcting certain historical errors, Le télégramme de Duchamp offers a bold interpretation of Fountain. Duve argues that Duchamp's urinal heralded the demise of the fine arts system and the advent of what he terms the system of “art in general." He further asserts, however, that this system did not originate in the 1960s but can be traced back to the 1880s. Duve's new book, therefore, shows that Duchamp was neither the creator nor agent of this new system, but rather its brilliant messenger. 

Interdisciplinary studies that combine the current of materialist thinking with discussions of ecologies and environmentalization.

Placed at the intersection of art, media, and cultural studies as well as economic theory, Liquidity, Flows, Circulation investigates the cultural logic of environmentalization. As flows, circulations, and liquidity resurface in all aspects of recent culture and contemporary art, this volume investigates the hypothesis of a genuine cultural logic of environmentalization through these three concepts.

It thus brings together two areas of research that have been largely separate. On the one hand, this volume takes up discussions about ecologies with and without nature and environmentalization as a contemporary form of power and capital. On the other hand, it takes its cue from Fredric Jameson’s notion that each stage of capitalism is accompanied by a genuine cultural logic. The volume introduces this current of materialist thinking into the ongoing discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. By analyzing contemporary art, architecture, theater, films, and literature, the fifteen contributions by scholars and artists explore different fields where liquid forms, semantics flow, or processes of circulation emerge as a contemporary cultural logic.
 

The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one another, both enriching and complicating generic distinctions. Artists were alive to the power of the arts to reflect and shape reality, and their audience was quick to turn to the arts as performative pleasures and critical lenses through which to understand a changing world. This collection's eminent authors discuss estate design, musicalized theater, the visual spectacle of musical performance, stage machinery and set designs, the social uses of painting and singing, drama’s reflection of a transformed military infrastructure, and the arts of memory and of laughter.

How artists created fictionalized identities to realize works that resisted political overreach and art historical conventions.
 
This book explores how a group of real California artists created imaginary artists, engaging with the political climate of the Cold War era and frustrating the discipline of art history. They employed pseudonymity, obfuscation, anonymity, (auto)biografiction, imaginary portraiture, heteronymity, role-playing, doubling, and alter ego. Often laced with humor, these exploits facilitated stylistic experimentation, provoking reactions from art viewers and governing authorities alike, and disrupting reliance on documentation and attribution within art history.
 
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Ed Kienholz, Walter Hopps, Robert Alexander, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, and Wallace Berman activated imagined and secret identities, provoking reactions within a conservative environment gripped by communist paranoia. As political concerns shifted in the 1960s and 1970s to movements for peace and equality, artists including Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Lynda Benglis, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Lowell Darling, and Eleanor Antin redirected these tactics to probe the rise of celebrity culture and the administrative state. These practices also became the precursor for later interventions by Bruce Conner, Asco, Allen Ruppersberg, Senga Nengudi, and others.
 
Considering a compelling range of visual material, including paintings, sculptures, and performed intrusions as well as publications, postcards, and advertisements, Monica Steinberg examines why these imaginary artists appeared when and where they did—and to what ends.