Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
The undersigned . . . being the maker of the metal construction entitled
Litanies . . . hereby withdraws from said construction all esthetic quality
and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction
has no such quality and content. 16
The thought implicit in this declaration was expressed at characteristically
greater length by Joseph Kosuth in his text of six years later, “Art after philosophy”:
“It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art.” Since art once had an
important decorative function, “any branch of philosophy that dealt with
‘beauty’ and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of
this ‘habit’ grew the notion that there was a conceptual connection between art
and aesthetics, which is not true.” 17
The basis for such ideas is the post-1900 displacement of the conceptual
center of art from reference to the world to the artist’s creative vision, to an
emphasis on the artist’s act, not properties of the object it produces, as definitive
of that object’s artistic status. It was, of course, Marcel Duchamp who first drew
the radical consequences of this emphasis, in his work after 1912 and in explanations
of it as involving an attempt to escape the rule of taste by the use of
mechanical techniques and the artistic recycling of “readymade” objects. 18 Once
any object chosen by an artist can be art, he claimed, art is no longer aesthetic—
that is, effective through its perceptual properties—in nature. In a 1961 lecture
on his invention of the readymade as an art form, Duchamp emphasized that
“the choice of these ‘Readymades’ was never dictated by esthetic delectation.
This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time
a total absence of good or bad taste.” 19
This statement is questionable: not only is the distinction between choice and
the exercise of taste far from clear, Duchamp’s choices in fact exemplify a consistent
(and specifically modernist) set of formal interests. 20 But the readymade
undoubtedly involved a shift in the concept of taste from the expressive action of
a uniquely gifted individual to—let us say—the design decisions of an informed
consumer. This change Duchamp expressed as a desire “to get away from the
16 Museum of Modern Art; ill. in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, 1994), p. 119.
17 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after philosophy I,” [1969], in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Idea Art (New York:
Dutton, 1973), p. 76.
18 See Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 134.
19 M. Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades’,” in ibid., p. 141.
20 For an excellent discussion of formal considerations involved in the production of the 1913 Bicycle
Wheel and the transformation of a bottle rack into the first “unassisted readymade” in 1914,
see Herbert Molderings, “The Bicycle Wheel and the Bottle Rack. Marcel Duchamp as a sculptor,”
in Marcel Duchamp Respirateur (Ostfildern: Staatliches Museum Schwerin/Hatje Cantz,
1999), pp. 141–69.
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