Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work

By Maurizio Lazarrato

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 institution, art “in the social sense of the word,” as Duchamp defined it, offers no promise of emancipation, but instead represents a new technique for governing subjectivity. Art is “a habit-forming drug. It’s a sedative drug.”