The work of art as a common object

Abstract

The aim of this article is to relate Duchamp's ready-made – a work of art that is identical  to a common object – with the history of art that preceded it and to understand how its radical rupture was already contained in that history. I choose to start it with an introduction and interpretation of the ready-made. Then, supported by Gombrich, Greenberg and others, I examine the three types of art in history proposed by Peter Bürger, focusing in the question of the reality/unreality of the work, gradually approaching the relation of the work with its character of object. My main point is that the two-dimensionality of the paiting reinforces the existence of the canvas (or of the support in question) and thus also the relation of its experience with the concrete world in which the paiting is found, as opposed to the dramatic illusion of the three-dimensional picture. Hereafter, I examine the impressionists, when its started a movement that goes to the reality of the canvas, which is then radicalized in various aspects of modernism, where Duchamp is found. Having taken this course, I examine Bürger's concept of vanguard and its relation to what he calls the "vital praxis", the world outside the illusionist framework, which I explain through Walter Benjamin's idea of distraction. Here, I suggest to think the ready-made as a proposal of transposition of art and its theory to the "non-artistic" world of the common things.