Recounts the Duchamp's artistic achievements in painting and sculpture, as well as his involvements with chess, film, theater, and people, and provides more than 1,300 reproductions of his works.

"Thierry de Duve has sought, in this remarkable text, to 'understand why Marcel Duchamp was such a great artist.' A task that calls upon resources beyond those of art history, art criticism, and aesthetic analysis, of all which the author is master. . . . The tone is wry, urbane, informed, and urgent; and it is a tribute to his appreciation of the depth of his subject that he takes us further in our understanding than we have ever seen before, but leaves us with the sense that more remains to be said than anyone before had imagined." -- Arthur C. Danto, Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University; and art critic, The Nation

Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesis with many implications for the history of the avant-gardes. Although Duchamps readymades broke with all previously known styles, Thierry de Duve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art." De Duve employs this shift in a re-reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that reveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism.

Since 1914 Marcel Duchamp has been called all of these. No artist of the twentieth century has aroused more passion and controversy, nor exerted a greater influence on art--the very essence of which Duchamp challenged and redefined as concept rather than product by questioning its traditionally privileged optical nature. At the same time, he never ceased to be engaged, openly or secretly, in provocative and enigmatic activities and works that transformed traditional art-making procedures. This definitive monograph, written with the enthusiastic support of Duchamp's widow, challenges received ideas, misunderstandings, and misinformation

A] beautifully designed book ... Duchamp emerges here as gendered, textual, carnal, and visual.... The discussion fostered by the Nova Scotia colloquium not only points to the future of Duchamp studies but suggests some significant directions for the new art history." -- Mason Klein, Artforum
The Duchamp scholars represented here are among the leading European and American critics of their generation. Their 11 essays offer lively and diverse pespectives on the artist, focusing on the major issues surrounding his contribution: the philosophical implications of Duchamp's skepticism, eroticism, and paradoxical acceptance of contradiction; the events leading to the creation of the infamous Fountain; a reinterpretation of Duchamp's late works as readymades; and the influence of scientific models on his art. Copublished with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
 

This expanded edition of the fall 1994 special issue of October includes new essays by Sarat Maharaj and by Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. It also includes the transcript of an exchange between T. J. Clark and Benjamin Buchloh which presents new responses to the problems raised by this immediately popular (and now out of print) issue of the journal. The Duchamp Effect is an investigation of the historical reception of the work of Marcel Duchamp from the 1950s to the present, including interviews by Benjamin Buchloh (with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Morris), Elizabeth Armstrong (with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner), and Martha Buskirk (with Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Fred Wilson) and a round-table discussion of the Duchamp effect on conceptual art. Contents Introduction · Benjamin H. D. Buchloh What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde? · Hal Foster Typotranslating the Green Box · Sarat Maharaj Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris · Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner · Elizabeth Armstrong Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism · Thierry de Duve Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg · Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louis Lawler, and Fred Wilson · Martha Buskirk Thoroughly Modern Marcel ·, Martha Buskirk Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp · October Round Table All the Things I Said about Duchamp: A Response to Benjamin Buchloh · T. J. Clark Response to T. J. Clark · Benjamin Buchloh