Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was the twentieth-century artist who most thoroughly transformed the question of what art is. Born in Blainville, France, in 1887, he emigrated to the United States in 1915, settled in New York, and spent the remainder of his career producing a small body of work whose conceptual force exceeded its modest material output. His readymades — ordinary objects displaced into the gallery — remade the terms on which cultural value could be discussed. By the time he died in 1968, the question of whether his gesture had democratized art or revealed its institutional conditioning was still being contested. Groys's engagement with Duchamp across his career treats the readymade as a philosophical event rather than an art-historical one.