Duchamp’s Telegram

A revisionist history of Duchamp's legacy and impact on modern art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp telegrammed a photograph of a urinal signed R. Mutt and called it art. When the piece arrived at its destination a good forty years later it was both celebrated and vilified as proclaiming that anything could be art--whereupon 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 early reception and critical legacy, heralding Duchamp's urinal as the end of the fine arts system and the beginning of what de Duve calls the Art-in-General system. Further, de Duve traces this new perspective back to the 1880s and charts a new history of radical art with Duchamp not as its author but its most famous messenger.