Fountains of Beauty (Duchamp’s Other Lesson)

Abstract

Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, the central figure in the lesson is Marcel Duchamp. This essay will argue that the Duchampian readymade offered artists a second, far less readily identifiable legacy, in which the lesson to be learned was not the irrelevance of beauty but rather its ubiquity. The main champion of this antithetical legacy is John Cage, who proposed that what made Robert Rauschenberg’s work so significant was that it demonstrated that “[b]eauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” This essay pursues the implications of Cage’s perspective on Rauschenberg by arguing for a different conception of aesthetic experience, one that can be understood as “uncritical” or “affirmative.” Where the critical avant-garde is distinguished by its institutionality at the service of critical cognition, the affirmative avant-garde, precisely because it rejects institutionality, is utterly incapable of critical cognition.