CONCEPT
The Readymade
Duchamp's gesture of displacing a profane object into the gallery — the founding demonstration that cultural value lies not in the material of the object but in the <em>frame</em> that exhibits it.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp purchased a urinal from a plumbing supply shop on Fifth Avenue, signed it "R. Mutt," and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York. The object was rejected. The scandal was productive. A century later, the urinal sits in the cultural archive as one of the most consequential artworks of the twentieth century — not because it is beautiful, not because it required skill, but because it performed an operation on the boundary between the culturally valued and the profane. The urinal crossed a line. The crossing was the art. The readymade, as a concept, formalizes this operation: the displacement of an ordinary object into a frame that transforms its cultural status without altering its material.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Groys built his theoretical apparatus on the readymade because it reveals with unusual clarity the structural logic of cultural valuation. The urinal itself did not change. What changed was its relationship to the institutional
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