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Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, by Leanne Shapton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2009. $18 paper
In the realm of art the question of repurposing has always been contentious. The issue was perhaps first raised early in the twentieth century by Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” the ordinary manufactured goods that Duchamp signed, titled, sometimes slightly modified, and then offered to the world as works of art. The spirit in which he made these offerings is generally assumed to be one of contempt—contempt for the increasing institutionalization of art through the museum and contempt for the larger forces of commodity capitalism infiltrating the world of art as well. Initially, the art world responded in kind to Duchamp: the most famous of his readymades, La Fontaine, a urinal he signed “R. Mutt” and entered in the 1917 Society for Independent Artists exhibit, was not displayed by the show’s organizers, who did not think that the piece qualified as art.
