ABSTRACT
Marcel Duchamp was well aware of the inherent double failure at the heart of the readymade aesthetic. Duchamp went over each blueprint for each readymade noting corrections and, once he was satisfied, he inscribed it with OK Marcel Duchamp. There is a base contradiction regarding the condition of an object within advanced consumer capitalism that is being played out through the remade readymades, one that Duchamp revels in and around which he constructs his general philosophy of art. If the ‘original’ readymades fail at being art, the remade readymades are able to achieve this object-oriented status not by simply accepting this failure but rather through their compounding of it – turning failures into accelerations. Far from betraying himself or the readymade as practice, the 1964 remades should be recognized as extending the core logic on which the readymades are founded: as always-already-replaceable products of a reproducible model.
