Wortgebilde Durch Spiel und Kombinatorik : Or, Why Duchamp Loved Words

Abstract

Meaningful art criticism in not possible unless the terms of language-description are successfully applied to the art historian’s themes. Because there is no generally valid scheme of metalinguistics to embrace the different means of communicating visual language information, for its special purposes this study resurrects Saussure’s distinction between the lexical and the arbitrary in order to examine the intellectual implications of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre. The argument examines the rhetorical features of visual form in discussing the work and attempts to suggest broader issues, of sociopolitical significance, through their analysis.