Bøker av Thierry De Duve

An elegant new edition of Bernd and Hilla Becher's classic black-and-white photographic study of industrial buildings.

A revisionist history of Duchamp's legacy and impact on modern art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent out a 'telegram' in the guise of a urinal signed R. Mutt. When it arrived at its destination a good forty years later it was both celebrated and vilified as proclaiming that anything could be art; from that point on, the whole Western art world reconfigured itself as 'post-Duchamp'. This book offers a reading of Duchamp's telegram that sheds new light on its first reception, corrects some historical mistakes and reveals that Duchamp's urinal in fact heralded the demise of the fine arts system and the advent of what Thierry de Duve calls the 'Art-in-General' system. Further, the author shows that this new system does not date from the 1960s but rather from the 1880s. Duchamp was neither its author nor its agent, but rather its brilliant messenger.

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century.

Reveals the invention of the readymade as a critical point in contemporary art. Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," this book presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction.

Clement Greenberg (1909-94), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. This title assesses Greenberg's writings, and features the approaches to the man and his work.