>>5141825I have often wondered about the truth of this hypothesis and have sought the help of art historians to come to a conclusion. It seems like no big deal at first glance, but the fact is that all of our art of the twentieth century is deeply rooted in a set of assumptions about the nature of objects. We have made art in the image of objects which have lost the qualities they had in reality. One of the most obvious examples of this was the work of Marcel Duchamp. I suppose we should not be surprised to hear him saying that painting, like mathematics, is about mathematics. I wish we could say that Duchamp meant for this statement to be taken literally. I have found his statement to be somewhat more metaphorical. Indeed, his whole practice, from the very beginning, has been to make work which is about objects which have been reduced to symbols, whose only function in reality has been to represent objects. We know now that Duchamp was a great artist in that sense, but the truth is that this work is deeply embedded in his own ideas about art. This in turn is deeply embedded in the conceptualism he brought with him to Paris in 1894. His concept of painting is in fact deeply embedded in this very conceptualism, a concept which is a consequence of the idea of representing. It is a consequence of a set of ideas which led him to look for 'object' in a way which would ensure that painting could represent objects. This is what leads us to see him as a very powerful painter. I say 'paintings' not in the least in the sense of what we generally consider artistic works. Rather, I am talking about what we often think of as works of art. I consider this distinction important in its own right. We think of Picasso's The Thinker as a painting, as a great artistic achievement, and we find it the subject of a very important essay in a very important journal, but we do not see the painting as a representation of an object or an object as represented.
