Bøger af Thierry De Duve

An elegant new edition of Bernd and Hilla Becher's classic black-and-white photographic study of industrial buildings.

A theoretical exploration of possible ways out of concepts adopted by the Enlightenment. Thierry de Duve outlines the main features of a critical theory of male, all-too-male sexuation and cross-gender emancipation, drawing on Marcel Gauchet's theses on Christianity as an exit from religion, Jacques Lacan's algebra of desire, and Geneviève Morel's analysis of the "law of the mother." Wouldn't it have required more than the translation of the three Christian maxims "faith, hope, love" into the revolutionary maxims "liberté, egalité, fraternité?" Is there more to the knot of incarnation, fatherhood, and the cult of Mary than just Christian mysticism? Can the uncertainty of fatherhood become an act of faith that acknowledges a fundamental uncertainty? Come On, Men, One More Effort... explores ways out of the dead end of political concepts adopted by the Enlightenment and their continued impact today, since the only possibility seems to be to embrace the religious and reject it at the same time.

A revisionist history of Duchamp's legacy and impact on modern art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent out a 'telegram' in the guise of a urinal signed R. Mutt. When it arrived at its destination a good forty years later it was both celebrated and vilified as proclaiming that anything could be art; from that point on, the whole Western art world reconfigured itself as 'post-Duchamp'. This book offers a reading of Duchamp's telegram that sheds new light on its first reception, corrects some historical mistakes and reveals that Duchamp's urinal in fact heralded the demise of the fine arts system and the advent of what Thierry de Duve calls the 'Art-in-General' system. Further, the author shows that this new system does not date from the 1960s but rather from the 1880s. Duchamp was neither its author nor its agent, but rather its brilliant messenger.

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century.

Reveals the invention of the readymade as a critical point in contemporary art. Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," this book presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction.

Clement Greenberg (1909-94), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. This title assesses Greenberg's writings, and features the approaches to the man and his work.

"Joseph Beuys", "Andy Warhol", "Yves Klein", and "Marcel Duchamp" form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. The author binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy.