Abstract
The “consecration” of the artist takes place through his inclusion in an art historical tradition. This is only possible, however, when “the one-man show” causes an artificial construction to appear as historical fact. Through the effects of the museum apparatus, the artist’s complete oeuvre is misperceived as an embodiment of the very principles according to which it had been judged. This inversion aligns the work in linear chronological terms, thus allowing it be fitted into a narrative of influence and causality. Duchamp’s crucial point is that the one-man show is supported by the actions of “the dealer” in securing a work’s commercial value. By asking Arturo Schwarz to produce replicas of Fountain, Duchamp exposed this crucial operation that proceeded his art historical recognition.
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Notes
- 1.
Lacan makes the same exact point when he writes that, before a work of art takes on the social (ideological) function of regulating human desire, “the creation of a painter” must first assume a certain level of commercial value: “before the aristocratic patron, it was the religious institution, with the holy image, that gave artists a living […] the situation is not fundamentally changed with the advent of the picture dealer. He too is a patron and a patron of the same stamp” (1981, p. 112).
- 2.
Not only does Duchamp display an acute awareness of how “the libidinal dynamics” of capitalism (Žižek, 2008, p. 19) dictate the logic of the aesthetic field, he also appears conscious of the fact that these dynamics are fundamentally aesthetic in nature: that the commodity -form is first and foremost an art-form, that commodification is not possible without the mechanism of aestheticization. For a more complete elaboration of this argument see Kilroy (2014, 2015, 2016).
References
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Kilroy, Robert. 2014. “The Return of the Master: Re-actualizing Žižek to Lacan’s Iconological Core.” Lacunae. APPI International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Vol. 3, Issue 2. pp. 40–58.
Kilroy, Robert. 2015. “Facebook: The Central Place of the Lacanian Clinic.” Lacunae. APPI International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Vol. 4, Issue 11. pp. 165–186.
Kilroy, Robert. 2016. “The Sublime Object of Iconology: Duchampian Appellation as Žižekian Interpellation.” Seachange: Art, Communication, Technology, Issue 6.
Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York & London: Norton & Company.
Tomkins, Calvin. 2013. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. New York: Badlands Unlimited.
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Kilroy, R. (2018). The One-Man Show and the Dealer. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_12
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