Kant after Duchamp - October Books Author:Thierry deDuve "Thierry de Duve has sought, in this remarkable text, to 'understand why Marcel Duchamp was such a great artist.' A task that calls upon resources beyond those of art history, art criticism, and aesthetic analysis, of all which the author is master. . . . The tone is wry, urbane, informed, and urgent; and it is a tribute to his appreciation of t... more »he depth of his subject that he takes us further in our understanding than we have ever seen before, but leaves us with the sense that more remains to be said than anyone before had imagined." -- Arthur C. Danto, Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University; and art critic, The Nation Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesis with many implications for the history of the avant-gardes. Although Duchamps readymades broke with all previously known styles, Thierry de Duve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art." De Duve employs this shift in a re-reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that reveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism.« less