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Kathleen Eamon, Duchamp’s Telegram: From Beaux-Arts to Art-in-General, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 82, Issue 4, Fall 2024, Pages 460–462, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpae057
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Extract
Thierry de Duve’s latest book, Duchamp’s Telegram, is itself quite the opposite of a telegram: it is long-form communication in the genre of art history. A philosopher of art might, on reading it, be tempted to luxuriate in the art historical detail and the way de Duve brings its central epochs to life. “What fun,” she might think, disagreeing with de Duve’s own repeated claim throughout that facts are boring. Maybe that’s true, if you made a career of them, but since that is not what a philosopher does, she might just feel safe to relax and enjoy the local color. And the book has plenty of art historical gossip, friendships and enmities, its share of scandals, and even some (soft) speculative fiction to offer.
The writing is fun, but (merely) luxuriating would be a mistake, and especially for the unwitting philosopher of art––precisely wrong for her, because it is in the detail that de Duve wants to locate and trace a world historical change to thinking itself. And to facts, for that matter! There are facts, and some are boring (by comparison). Not the new fact in town, however: it is an “aesthetic fact.” An aesthetic fact can, it seems, be heard around the world––even if it is born in France. It is the kind of fact not even a philosopher can ignore because it is precisely a fact of reason. Once we live in the after-the-fact, this approach postulates, we have to inch our way to the what-came-before. If inching, why bother? Two reasons: as a kind of transcendental critique of our time, and, second, because access to our prehistory seems to promise provisional moments of escape in what would otherwise be a seamless absorption in our own.
