In “The Richard Mutt Case” Marcel Duchamp mounts a defense of his 1917 work Fountain. After outlining that defense, explain what it reveals about Duchamp’s priorities as an artist: what does he value? why is this important? Finally, how does this text help us better understand the object?
Richard Mutt Case: Marcel Duchamp, “The Richard Mutt Case,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 252
Question: : Wilson’s postwar novel gives us the characters Tom and Betsy Rath. From the pages you read, how would you describe this pair? What do they value? What do you think they represent? Next, put them in dialogue with a work by or featuring Jackson Pollock from class. How could we discuss the Raths and Pollock in relation to one another? In other words, how do the Raths help us understand the radicality (or lack thereof) of Pollock?
Novel: Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), 1-30
The aim of these papers is to give you practice in situating works of art in their historical contexts and/or within the larger field of art history. What can the ambitions of an artist—as outlined in an artist statement— or the responses of critics—as articulated in a review—tell us about the priorities or values of a particular historical moment; and then how can we deploy that information in offering our own accounts of what is happening in a week of art? How can we assess the work of scholars who came before us and then position our thought in relation to theirs?
