The Brooklyn Rail

Marcel Duchamp’s legacy feels both indispensable and, in certain respects, incomplete. Indispensable because he effectively democratized the judgment of art and identified the arbitrariness of aesthetic value, the performativity of authorship, the constitutive role of the beholder, and the speculative logic underlying the art market; incomplete because he never seriously questioned individualism, nor the mechanisms of value extraction from the labor of the multitude in the art world. Duchamp used pseudonyms; he multiplied personas; he declared that the spectator completes the work—but he never dissolved the individual authorship into an actual collective. He also never considered that perhaps the economic proceeds of art should flow back to those who collectively generate its value.

Today, when AI systems harvest the creative labor of millions of anonymous individuals to generate images and cultural products—including artworks—whose proceeds flow to a handful of corporations, the questions Duchamp left unanswered have become urgent at a scale he could not have imagined. The unresolved contradictions in his work are structural problems that continue to shape who gets to make art, who benefits from it, and who is excluded from both. The symbolic capital and economic value created by artists is captured and exploited by institutions, dealers, markets, and real estate developers rather than returned to the people who generate it. Duchamp’s readymade performs a radical gesture at the level of the object while leaving this mechanism of extraction entirely intact. Meanwhile, most artists make next to nothing from their work.

Duchamp questioned the individual author, but always from within the structure of individual authorship. He multiplied his signatures, dressed them in disguises, gave them new genders and fictional names—but he never dissolved the individual author into an actual collective. By reducing authorship to the act of designation, he exposed the art world as a system of agreements rather than a repository of intrinsic worth. He argued that the creative act is not completed by the artist alone but by the spectator, who brings the work into contact with the world. These were genuinely radical ideas. But what Duchamp never resolved was the question of who ultimately captures the value that the multitude of artists and spectator’s collective labor generates. His model of art making acknowledged the beholder’s constitutive role while leaving the economic structure of authorship entirely untouched. The spectator completes the work, but the proceeds go elsewhere.

I would like to add to Duchamp’s statement that the beholder not only completes the artwork, but also completes its value. Today, it is clear that the online circulation of images of artworks by audiences increases, in aggregate, an artwork’s visibility, cultural attention, and market value. The beholder who completes the value of the artwork is not a single contemplative subject, but a networked multitude—and I am proposing that this multitude has a structural claim on what their contribution to the symbolic capital and economic value of an artwork is worth.

One of the major inspirations for my work, coming from Duchamp, was the story about the signature of the Woolworth Building. In January 1916, shortly after arriving in New York, Duchamp jotted a note to himself that has fascinated scholars ever since: “trouver inscription pour Woolworth Bldg comme readymade,” by which he meant to “devise a title/label for the Woolworth Building as a readymade.” The world’s tallest building at the time—a Gothic cathedral of commerce rising sixty floors above Lower Manhattan—was to be claimed as art by the simple act of signing it. The gesture was never realized, remaining a private notation rather than a public act, but its logic is perfectly consistent with everything else Duchamp was doing: the readymade reduced artistic authorship to an act of designation, and the Woolworth Building was simply the most audacious object imaginable to designate. Yet even here—in this most expansive and apparently ego-dissolving of gestures—the structure of individual authorship remains fully intact. It would be Marcel Duchamp who signed the building, Marcel Duchamp whose name would confer art status upon the building’s thousands of workers, the millions who passed through it, the entire city whose skyline it defined—none of them would share in the authorship, let alone in whatever value that authorship might generate.

In Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity (2014)¹, my co-editors and I argued that the figure of the author functions as a mechanism of extraction—a way of concentrating and capturing value that is in reality generated by a network of collective creative processes. Many scholars—including Thierry de Duve, the commissioning guest-editor of this text—have engaged rigorously with the questions surrounding value in Duchamp’s work. His gestures toward the market—the Monte Carlo Bond (1924), the Tzanck Check (1919), the readymades—were seen as anticipating the financialization of art: the moment when art ceases to be a luxury good and becomes a speculative asset, and art’s gestures of refusal are absorbed and monetized by the very system they set out to question (Hal Foster). Many saw Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond as exposing how art’s apparent exceptionalism is precisely what enables it to generate and sustain enormous financial value (Diedrich Diederichsen). Others have shown that the signature in Duchamp’s work is not merely a mark of identity but a mechanism of ownership—it binds work and author together, concentrating value while simultaneously excluding all those who cannot make such a claim (Isabelle Graw). Others (David Joselit) identified Duchamp’s practice as fusing the roles of artist and debtor, collector and creditor, who himself fuses aesthetic and exchange value into a single irresolvable object, the irresolution of which ultimately reinforces rather than dismantles the individual author’s claim on value. Together, these accounts circle the same unresolved problem: that every gesture aimed at questioning the value of art has so far succeeded only in producing more of it, concentrated in fewer hands. What none of these accounts address, however, is the question my work tried to pose directly: if the bond acknowledged that art generates financial value, and if that value depends on the labor and presence of a community of artists and beholders, then why should only one person—the artist, the collector, the estate—hold the winning ticket?

I wanted to take the step that I believe Duchamp never did. Since 2013, I have developed The End of Signature—a project which fused together thousands of signatures of various communities: in one instance it was the visitors of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, then the employees of the Cleveland Museum of Art, scientists and academics who worked at MIT, and members of various protest movements. The signature, which Duchamp destabilized but never abolished, was replaced there by a collective mark that could not be attributed to any individual. This year, I am developing a new iteration of the project, entitled REDISTRIBUTION. The work fuses thousands of anonymous signatures from New York artists into a single collective signature using an AI algorithm and encodes equal profit-sharing directly into the conditions of the work’s sale. Each time the work is sold, all the contributors will share equally in the profits, turning the artwork itself into a continuous mechanism of redistribution. Based on hundreds of anonymous signatures from New York’s artist community, the piece will continue to evolve as new signatures are collected.

REDISTRIBUTION explores questions of networked value creation, and the redistribution of capital in the art world. It treats financial return not as a corruption of artistic purpose, but as a right, and it encodes that right into the structure of the work. My work proposes that artists take things into their own hands and reprogram the mechanism by which art generates and concentrates value and wealth in the art world. REDISTRIBUTION does not just imagine solidarity, it treats redistribution as both a work of art and a form of mutual aid, hoping to catalyze others to do the same.