Look!: 100 Years Of Contemporary Art

by Thierry de Duve

Devoted to the art of the art of the twentieth century, Look! seeks to transmit rather than pass judgment on a century in which presentation has replaced representation. The challenge taken on by Look! is to present the works of art in such a way that they present themselves, that they address us, their spectators, and that they speak to all of us. Look! is therefore divided into three the first, Here I Am, presents works in which human beings are presented even if they are not specifically represented; the second, Here You Are, features works that address their spectators face to face, that rely on the viewer to complete them; and the third, Here We Are, displays a community of works that testify to what binds us together as a global human society. Lavishly illustrated and historically refreshing, Look! features extensive text by internationally renowned art historian and philosopher Thierry de Duve.

302 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2001

About the author

Thierry de Duve, son of Nobel Prize-winning cytologist and biochemist Christian de Duve, is a Belgian scholar of the history and theory of modern and contemporary art. He is a scholar of Immanuel Kant and has written several books on the artist Marcel Duchamp, including: Pictorial Nominalism; On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (1991), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (1993), and Kant After Duchamp (1998). Committed to a reinterpretation of modernism, much of his earlier work revolves around the challenges presented in Marcel Duchamp's readymades and their and implications for aesthetics. Thierry de Duve outlines an aesthetic theory of art to meet the requirements of our time, which mainly consists of three components: 1.) updating Kant's aesthetics by replacing the phrase "this is beautiful" with "this is art" as the paradigm for aesthetic judgment; 2.) reassessing Modernism in painting from Manet onwards with theory informed by Clement Greenberg, while at the same time acknowledging its failure; 3.) reflecting on the historical evolution of Fine Arts from the primacy of painting as a specific privileged avenue for art production to the general "art at large" espoused by later theorists and practitioners of contemporary art.

For Thierry de Duve there is no difference between modern, post-modern and contemporary art: the same logic rules from the beginning. Art has no essence; it is simply what we call by that name. Borrowing from Lacanian identity theory, Duve argues that the human brain develops prematurely, and the drive to create and consume art arises from neotenous desires that condition all humans. Thus for him, the enterprise of art remains utterly tragic: accounting for and responding to messianic desires of how life should be while at the same time informed by a postmodern weariness of modernism's naivety and inevitable failure.

With his colleague Jean Guiraud he co-founded the free institute of Fine Art, École de Recherche Graphique (ERG), in Brussels, 1972. He curated the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003. He has been a visiting professor at: the University of Lille III (France), the Sorbonne (France), MIT, and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in Penn's History of Art Department. He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2000, he curated the exhibition "Here - 100 years of contemporary art," at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.