Ermanno Migliorini

In 1914, shortly before leaving for New York, Marcel Duchamp made a disruptive gesture: elevating a bottle rack to the status of a work of art through the mere selection of that object and its subsequent transfer to the ‘sacred perimeter’ of his studio. This action inaugurates the practice of readymades, industrial, everyday products to which the artist arbitrarily assigns the status of works of art, openly and ironically challenging the idea of the artist faber.The Scolabottiglie thus becomes a historical precedent that allows Ermanno Migliorini to carry out, on the one hand, an acute and far-sighted analysis of international art in the second half of the 20th century, identifying the challenges posed by the neo-avant-gardes indebted to Duchamp's iconoclastic attitude; on the other hand, he illuminates the problems that the drifts of this gesture cause to the ‘aesthetic edifice’ and to art critics unprepared to deal with it. In this fundamental essay from 1970, an attempt is made to clarify, through the lens of analytical philosophy, the general significance of Duchamp's operation and the statements that accompany it insofar as they highlight the dissociation between the artistic procedure and traditional evaluative structures. The claim to ‘propose value without bringing reasons’ has contributed to profoundly marking the direction in which much of the art of our time is moving. A direction that in the background finds, if not exactly the Scolabottiglie or another readymade, something that looks very much like it, namely something linked to the plane of unmotivated and unmovable sensitive experiences.