Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work

Synopsis

Duchamp was among the first to understand that in Control Societies, whose structures began to appear in art well before they did elsewhere, art as an insti- tution, art “in the social sense of the word,” as Duchamp defined it, offers no promise of emanci- pation, but instead represents a new technique for governing subjectivity. Art is “a habit-forming drug. It’s a sedative drug.”