Duchamp’s Telegram: From Beaux-Arts to Art-in-General by Thierry de Duve

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

Impish yet magisterial, Thierry de Duve continues a career’s investigation of what he now calls “Duchamp’s telegram.” The occasion of this telegram is the piece Duchamp dubbed Fountain (1917). From the start, de Duve is clear about what Fountain signifies: it “is situated at the juncture of two art worlds, one in which a urinal cannot possibly be art and one in which this urinal is art” (13). In this book, de Duve, among the most provocative of contemporary theorists of visual art, insistently identifies himself as an art historian. The questions the art historian pursues, with all the gathered evidence of a long immersion in the literature around Fountain, Duchamp, French art institutions, and various avant-gardes, concern the historical circumstances that made that juncture possible. How did an object that could not possibly be art become art? And who was able to receive and read the telegram announcing this shift, and when did this reception occur?

De Duve’s answer to these questions is simple: once it was decided that anyone could be an artist, anything could be art. And, certain artists of the 1960s were the first really to read the telegram. These two sentences of summary, however, convey nothing of the richness of this book’s historical scholarship, nor do they suggest the intensity of its challenge to some conventional understandings of Duchamp and the avant-garde. As its title suggests, de Duve is concerned with the consequential shift from one art system to another: Duchamp’s telegram is sent from the midst of this shift. De Duve insists that Duchamp is not the agent of this shift but its messenger: a heroizing account might make Duchamp the inventor of the Art-in-General system, but de Duve argues that this system dates from the 1880s and the aftermath of the “disastrous salon of 1880”: “When all is said and done, what the creation of the Indépendants signaled was—unbeknownst to all protagonists—the advent of the global Art-in-General system in which we still live, where art can be made from anything whatsoever” (205). A signal broadcasting the news of a new system, “unbeknownst to all protagonists”: De Duve’s argument, here and throughout, relies on a strong signal and a belated reception. Fountain boosts the signal; that signal by no means originates with the urinal offered as art but, instead, with the formation of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris in 1884 and that society’s insistence, against and in reaction to the official Salon, that no criteria determined whether someone was an artist and that their salons would have no juries: anything produced by a “self-proclaimed and nominally confirmed artist” would, then, “inevitably be a work of art” (158).

De Duve narrates the aftermath of this decision with a wealth of detail and a set of reverberant iterations not replicable here: in de Duve’s account of a history many readers will know in brief but almost no one, I’d wager, with his breadth, Duchamp mischievously gets his revenge. With the rejection of his Nude Descending a Staircase by the Paris Indépendants in 1912 very much on his mind, Duchamp submits R. Mutt’s Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917—with every expectation that they would reject it. And they did. By tracing the logic of the independents, de Duve argues that “Duchamp is not the author or the agent of a sea change in the art institution but merely its messenger” (16). The Parisian independents and their faithful New York imitators established the logic by which anything an artist presented as art had to be art; Duchamp boosted the signal of their reorganization of “the art institution” by taking them at their word. “It is a matter of sheer logic,” writes de Duve, “not of intentionality or consciousness: if anyone with six dollars to spend on a membership card to the Indeps was an artist, and if artists of all schools could be certain that whatever they sent would be hung, it was then only logical to infer that, at the Society of Independent Artists, anything whatsoever could be art” (41).

Duchamp’s Telegram is built around two delays: first, the delay between the formation of the Paris Indépendants in 1884 and Duchamp’s submission of Fountain in 1917; second, the delay between the telegram sent through that submission and the artists of the 1960s (most notably, Bernar Venet, Nahum Tevet, and Marcel Broodthaers), who received it in their various ways. (With the possible exception of Broodthaers, de Duve does not round up the usual suspects: his discussions of these artists each deserve separate reviews.) “Facts have the last word in art history,” de Duve writes, here thinking primarily of “a precise institutional context with a precise transatlantic history” that informs his placement of Fountain (108). This insistence on facts—the book contains many surprising ones—also inspires questions: what kind of fact does delayed reception constitute? Is the force of a logic, legible in retrospect but unrecognized by anyone at the moment in question (any moment, let’s say, between 1884 and 1917), a fact? Of course, de Duve acknowledges this theoretical difficulty and that “classical historiography” has no concept adequate to the reception of Duchamp in the 1960s (112). De Duve invokes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the constellation only quickly to reject it: he prefers instead to think about “a complex compound of givens and delays—two important Duchampian tropes.” For de Duve, the relationship between 1917 and 1964 “deserves a reading that recognizes the capacity of art to theorize itself,” and Duchamp’s terms provide a template for such recognition (112).

These givens and delays, however, point to another intriguing methodological claim: de Duve stresses that this book treats “when and how” the transition from the Beaux-Arts system to the Art-in-General system occurred, “leaving the deeper and broader question of why it occurred largely untouched, because it is premature” (13). This extensive volume, de Duve announces, is one half of “a two-book project conceived under the heading Modernism Revisited,” with the potential implication that the second, forthcoming volume may have more to say about the “untouched” question of “why” (12). There are also places, however, where de Duve suggests that the completion of the account of why the Art-in-General system became dominant might be part of the work of new generations of art historians (e.g., 400n13; 392–93).

De Duve’s insistence on this volume as a contribution to the history of art in the narrow sense does not mean that it will not lead to questions that might be applied, so to speak, more generally. Does the Art-in-General system define a change confined to visual art, or does its very being general necessarily extend to all arts? Are we inside the general system where anything can be poetry, dance, theater, literature? (We might say yes—but have we actually acknowledged receipt of the telegram? De Duve himself does this only on the final page of this book, when he dubs Fountain, at last, “a work of art” [398].) If so, does the genealogy of similar transitions—from theater as drama, say, to Theater-in-General—map onto the transition de Duve offers here? How much does the decision of a loose confederation of renegade Parisian artists matter to this more general history of the arts?

De Duve does address the narrower question of the relationship of Art-in-General to modernism and his concern with delays takes the form of an intriguing metaphor: high modernism, which he defines as “the years between the 1880s and the 1960s,” was “the incubation period for the Art-in-General system” (392). For de Duve, modernism “is a response to the anything-goes condition, the response most compelled by truthfulness to it and therefore arguably the most compelling one” (381). So, even though Duchamp’s telegram had not yet been fully acknowledged, during this “incubation period” modernists responded to a condition, even when they were not yet fully alive to it. The claim that modernists responded with “truthfulness” indicates that, even if anything goes, not everything works. In dialogue but also in constructive disagreement with Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, de Duve insists that judgment remains necessary: some artworks are more compelling than others. De Duve writes of Fried and an artist he disparaged, Donald Judd, that they both “had real awareness of the anything-goes condition ruling over the art world since Duchamp but that neither took it seriously” (294). Duchamp’s Telegram is a playful, erudite, and challenging lesson in taking this condition seriously. But why did this condition come about? De Duve’s promised companion volume may revisit this question. In the meantime, this book should inspire further research, and not in art history only, into the question of what it has meant, and what it means, that anything goes.