In 1863, Baudelaire claimed that Modernity is “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, that which is half art and the other half eternal or immutable.”
Let us place this expression alongside Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
To begin establishing relationships between them, we must first consider Modernity: a notion that not only defines a historical period but also transcended as a conceptual category encompassing the framework of aesthetic emancipation. From a temporal perspective, Modernity has fostered various interpretations: in a broad sense, it spans from the 15th century to the first half of the 20th century, and for some, it is still debatable whether it has ended. We can mention as major milestones influencing our analysis: the discovery of the Americas, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the overthrow of monarchies, and the rise of capitalism.
Modernity has been a period of vast transformations in social, political, and economic fields, which accumulated as fissures paving the way for what we now recognize as the great revolution of modern art.

As an aesthetic concept, Modernity is often linked with what is called aesthetic autonomy, associated with the emergence of artists’ self-awareness regarding their stance toward individual production, once subordinate to the ideological and political systems of their time.
This self-awareness grew as artists adopted new attitudes toward art, dissociating their production from the regulatory power structures of their society, while simultaneously—and perhaps inevitably—shifting toward the emerging economic system. These processes led to the development of a new aesthetic discourse identified with Modernity.

Among the precursors to these processes, we note the shift in artistic production from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. The former emerged in the late 18th century, seeking in classical cultures the archetypes of “Western art,” thereby proposing an ethical-ideological system to respond to issues of liberty and duty.
However, the tension this artistic style held with Enlightenment ideas, as well as the social and political events that shaped France—from the revolution’s triumph to the fall of Napoleon’s empire—eventually caused it to dissolve.

The opposite effect occurred socially: in post-Napoleonic France, the bourgeoisie solidified their ideas and social standing. Artists were part of this class, although they often chose to remain on its periphery.

Romanticism, on the other hand, expressed a clear artistic attitude toward history and natural and social reality. Baudelaire emphasized that what distinguishes modernity is an attitude toward the experience of a specific present, which sets it apart from other times.
Romantic attitudes—whether rational or emotional—mark the first stance toward art history: that art does not arise from nature but from art itself, and not only includes itself but becomes a way of thinking through images—no less legitimate than thinking through pure concepts.
However, the Romantic identity, often tinted by solitude and the poetics of the sublime, would soon be affected by new developments separating it from nature, due to rapid urban and economic growth driven by industrialization.

Capitalism’s rise inevitably displaced artists toward the industrial sphere, dislocating the notion of artistic production protected under the veil of the genius-artist and unity, toward mass production. Photography, emerging in the early 19th century and formally recognized in 1839, marked a major rupture not only in terms of serial production but also in representation.

In this context, artists became dissidents of their own class—the modern artist is a bourgeois who rejects the bourgeois—a fugitive chasing the dissolution of “high art” and seeking to reunite art and life. This is the utopian mission art set for itself, and that implies, within aesthetics, its emancipation.
It is paradoxical that modern art, in its utopian quest to merge art and life, created a wider breach precisely when it introduced a new approach to artistic practice: the incorporation of everyday objects into the artistic dimension—objects that had never before been associated directly with artistic categories.
This is the case of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, art pieces made from everyday, industrially produced objects appropriated by chance.

Duchamp created multiple ruptures in the continuum of art—but above all, he enabled the escape that Baudelaire had anticipated. Like someone fleeing home to never return, there is always a prelude to that final step. Like many modern artists, Duchamp’s journey began with the intent to leave behind the horizon of representation—art historically tied to figuration—which he called “retinal” and increasingly despised.

Duchamp had several antecedents for formulating his ready-mades. As a young artist, Impressionism had already begun to abandon mimesis. Cubism had also stepped off the canvas with the 1912 collages; that same year Duchamp distanced himself from the Cubist circle after the rejection of his masterful painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2.

Another link in the chain leading to the ready-mades was the influence of mechanization—a concept photography had established nearly a century earlier. For Duchamp, it was the modern experience—almost like the flâneur—that led him to notice a chocolate grinder in a shop window: a simple, trivial, industrial object. His first reflections on this came through two-dimensional oil paintings in 1913, in his Chocolate Grinder series.
That same year marked critical changes in his artistic inquiry—he practically abandoned traditional forms of painting and drawing to build mechanical models. He developed his own spatiotemporal system, which, according to him, “stretched the laws of physics a little.” The most recognized work from this period is 3 Standard Stoppages.

Likewise, his friend Francis Picabia had already planted in him the seed of modernity as an attitude—something Duchamp understood well. Finally, toward the end of 1916, Tristan Tzara sent him The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher, which conveyed Dadaism’s radical ideas of “anti-art,” the questioning of the artist’s role, and the absurdity of technique and tradition.

All these influences and explorations in his artistic practice led Duchamp to a turning point in art history. His ready-mades combined industrial appropriation, the questioning of authorship, and chance in a single work.
Looking back at the history of human artistic production, the inflection point marked by modern art—and specifically the ready-mades—is clear. What remains less obvious is the phenomenon of bringing art closer to life through its own objects, only to result in a greater distance between the two realms.
Ready-mades are problematic objects even today—for audiences, art historians and theorists, and for Aesthetics itself.

What many find obvious about the ready-mades is the chronology of their origin—not how they can be read or inscribed in art or Aesthetics. Ready-mades push us toward an intelligibility not fully resolved by the aestheticization of life, captive as it is to commodification.
Nor can they be understood solely through the legitimizing processes that determine what is accepted as art. The situation we are led to involves the very reflection we must undertake—not only to define what we consider art, but also to discern and thus understand it.

Duchamp throws a shovel or a urinal into the art system, and in doing so transforms their categorical identity through a simple operation of displacement—from life to art.
This equality, established by the ready-mades, demanded a new approach to artworks—beyond the historiography of forms and styles.
Thus, the ready-mades forced art studies to engage with ontological, epistemological, and institutional questions.

Duchamp was not only an artist within Dadaism who used scandal to shock—he was also a reflective and consistent thinker. His conceptual rupture, beginning in 1913 when he abandoned traditional artistic methods, anticipated programmatic notions in art production. His famous question—”Can one make works that are not ‘works of art’?”—prefigured conceptual ideas. His 1914 reference to a “kind of pictorial nominalism” anticipated an analysis of how something becomes art simply by being named or presented as such.

This inflection point in the conception and production of art marked a milestone, showing that formal analysis alone is insufficient to resolve our initial questions: how do we discern what art is, and what determines it as such?

For Arthur Danto—decades later, facing similar questions with Pop Art—it became clear that a shift from sensory experience to thought was necessary:

“[…] This means that one can no longer teach the meaning of art through examples. It also implies that as long as appearances matter, anything could be a work of art, and that if one were to investigate what art is, it would be necessary to shift from sensory experience to thought. This means, in short, that one must turn to philosophy.”

Turning to philosophy, we find that in early Aesthetic theory, art was treated as a form of sensory knowledge. Two key thinkers—Kant and Hegel—helped shape modern aesthetic discourse and can guide us further.

First, Kant developed a philosophical system exploring the nature of aesthetic judgment. He positioned the subject of judgment in relation to the object, yet outside of it. The relationship hinges on the “free play of the imagination” and the concept of “purposiveness without purpose”—a genuine disinterest between subject and object.
Kant’s framework inquires how aesthetic judgment is possible through a logic that cancels attachment and utility, connecting imagination with freedom and the conditions presumed by reason. This tension, in Kant’s system, grants autonomy—something we can extrapolate to art.

Hegel, as Konrad P. Liessmann clearly explains, conceived human history as progress in consciousness of freedom and as the process of becoming aware of the Absolute.
He identified three historically successive forms in which the human spirit could express objective truth: art, religion, and philosophy. In art, truth is shown immediately and sensibly; in religion, mythically; and in philosophy, conceptually.
Once spirit understands itself as concept, it finds its true medium in developed philosophical sciences. Thus, art and religion lose their original function as bearers of truth or presence of the Absolute.

For Hegel, reason emerges in Enlightenment society and imposes new coercive forces, dissolving the ties between art and society. This severing marked art’s inability to fulfill its philosophical function, thus leading to its “death”—not a disappearance, but a boundary, a conceptual end.

This “death” grants art free will. The moment art ceases to be an objective expression of truth, it gains freedom. Hegel marks this conceptual boundary as temporal, and his notion of “death” equates to finitude—where art ends its former identity.

Because of these philosophical developments, it became common to say that art “died” in aesthetic modernity. But now we understand it not as disappearance, but as a limit.

Historically, artistic emancipation initially led to secular searches. The decline of religious themes gave way to the individual, opening up infinite interests. For modern art practices, this prerogative entailed all manner of experimentation and production aimed at autonomy—through reformulation or abolition of formal structures seen as burdens.

Other approaches—like Duchamp’s—linked conceptual exercises with the technical critique of art. The result was often singularities only possible within a horizon of radical heterogeneity. That horizon reaches into our present and repeatedly compels us to ask the very questions the ready-mades provoke: how do we discern what is art and how should we conceive of art itself?

Hegelian aesthetics still applies to certain art forms, but not to all modern ones. For our purposes, it helps only in marking a clear endpoint. What comes after that end has led art theory into confusion and disagreement.

Some may find Jacques Rancière’s assertion both general and decisive: for art to exist, it requires a gaze and a thought that identify it.

When Aesthetics began with Baumgarten, art was treated as a form of sensory knowledge. Modern art’s deviations made it clear those ideas were no longer sufficient—indeed, they caused confusion and even controversy.

Following Rancière, the discomfort Aesthetics produces stems from being a field in flux and transformation:

“The philosophers who initiated Aesthetics […] did not invent the rupture of the hierarchical order that determined which themes and expressive forms were worthy of entering the realm of art. […] They did not invent, in short, all those reconfigurations of the relationships between writing and the visual, between pure and applied art, between art forms and the forms of public or commercial life, which define the aesthetic regime of art.”

For Rancière, Aesthetics today helps clarify what that word means—as a mode of art’s functioning, a discursive matrix, a form of artistic identification, and a redistribution of sensory experience.

In 1917, Duchamp introduced a type of art that marked an end—and thus inevitably also began a new way of making art. A hundred years on, the ready-made, from a historical perspective, has acquired a stylistic profile—the very thing it once rebelled against.

From an aesthetic approach, the debates continue. And meanwhile, we may still be in debt to Kant—or perhaps need to take entirely new paths in Western thought that will finally allow us to surpass him.

All these intersections give shape to these conversations, a century after Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.