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Thierry de Duve’s is a crucial and utterly distinct voice in the field of modern art. Delightfully original and engaging, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx combines the author’s inimitably bold thinking with an unusual sensitivity to the ways that particular works articulate the convergence of aesthetics and economics. Its gorgeously constructed essays tell this art’s stories so well, they often read like the best biographical fiction.

(Darby English, University of Chicago, back cover)

That Beuys, Warhol, Klein, and Duchamp were variously engaged in rewriting the terms of production, circulation, and consumption of art, and did so by creating new work which challenged the received nature of the artwork is an oft-mentioned, oft-theorized fact. No one has gone so far in thinking through the dramatic intentions and achievements of these artists as de Duve, who in this free radical of a book, maps categories of political economy found in the pages of Marx onto their projects. De Duve’s recruitment of Marx is of such originality as to return the reader to Marx’s own texts, whose astonishing insights into production, mechanization, price, money, exchange value, the creativity of labor, and the innovation of markets have been neglected in recent times but demand reawakening. Written with verve, intricacy, and narrative fluency, this book probes and proves that these are the parameters in which the avant-gardes transact, and through which they must be brought to speech.

(Daniel Herwitz, University of Michigan, back cover)

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In this compelling study, Thierry de Duve reads Greenberg against the grain of the famous critic’s critics—and sometimes against the grain of the critic himself. By reinterpreting Greenberg’s interpretations of Pollock, Duchamp, and other canonical figures, de Duve establishes new theoretical coordinates by which to understand the uneasy complexities and importance of Greenberg’s practice.

(John O’Brian, back cover)

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Under its English title, Look, this book offers a room per room visit of the exhibition Voici (Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts), as well as a three-part essay in which Thierry de Duve, curator of the exhibition, proposes a novel vision of artistic modernity, raising the issues of presentation, address, and community.

(Back cover)

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To look through a Becher book is to take a lesson in vernacular aesthetics; it is to learn to read differences in composition, rhythm and formal solutions where an ordinarily distracted eye would see only indifference and standardisation; it is to derive intense pleasure from your own capacity of discrimination; it is to suffer from your inability to back it up by a technical vocabulary that would make it possible for you to detail a gasometer’s architecture as if it were a cathedral.

(TdD, back cover)

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In this compelling study, Thierry de Duve reads Greenberg against the grain of the famous critic’s critics—and sometimes against the grain of the critic himself. By reinterpreting Greenberg’s interpretations of Pollock, Duchamp, and other canonical figures, de Duve establishes new theoretical coordinates by which to understand the uneasy complexities and importance of Greenberg’s practice.

(John O’Brian, back cover)

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Kant after Duchamp mounts the most formidable case yet made for Duchamp’s importance, and what makes Thierry de Duve’s achievement all the more unexpected is that this is done by way of an intense engagement with the writings of Clement Greenberg. You don’t have to agree will all of de Duve’s premises and arguments (needless to say I don’t) in order to recognize that he has written a brilliant and learned “archaelology” of Duchampian modernism that is also a highly original contribution to philosophical aesthetics.

(Michael Fried, back cover, hardcover edition)

This is an excellent book. It is clear, careful, erudite, witty, and deep, tremendously illuminating and a pleasure to read. As an artist I quite naturally dismiss the question of whether something I produce is art or not as irrelevant. De Duve is the first to convince me of the importance and centrality of this question in the history of contemporary art, not only for critics and aestheticians, but for artists.

(Adrian Piper, back cover, hardcover edition)

Thierry de Duve has sought, in this remarkable text, to “understand why Marcel Duchamp was such a great artist.” A task that calls upon resources beyond those of art history, art criticism, and aesthetic analysis, of all of which the author is master. It appears to demand a discipline as intricate as its subject is complex. The tone is wry, urbane, informed, and urgent; and it is a tribute to his appreciation of the depth of his subject that he takes us further in our understanding than we have ever been before, but leaves us with a sense that more remains to be said than anyone before had imagined.

(Arthur Danto, back cover, hardcover edition)

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The scholars represented here are the leading European and American Duchamp critics of their generation—a number of whom have staked out opposing territories, making for a particularly animated critique of this fascinating artist and his provocative works. (Essays by Craog Adcock, Eric Cameron, William Camfield, Thierry de Duve, André Gervais, Carol James, Rosalind Krauss, Herbert Molderings, Francis Naumann, Molly Nesbit, Jean Suquet.)

(Inside flap, hardcover edition)

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In Pictorial Nominalism Thierry de Duve enters into current debates concerning the crisis of representation through an extensive reexamination of the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. Taking as a point of departure the instance in 1912 when Duchamp wrote in a note to himself, “No more painting, get a job,” de Duve considers the implications of the invention of the “readymade.” Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become “impossible,” de Duve produces a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction that differs considerably from those of such thinkers as Clement Greenberg and Peter Bürger.

The questions opened by Pictorial Nominalism are not limited to Duchamp. With the readymade as a nodal point in the overturning of aesthetic practice as it has been commonly understood, de Duve makes use of poststructuralist thought to write a revised history of modernism. He examines ways in which the basic categories of pictorial practice—its exhibiting institutions, legitimizing sources, and forms of subjectivity—have been constituted and changed and ultimately demonstrates that the readymade is the link between painting in particular and art at large.

(Back cover)