Thierry de Duve

Jeff Wall (b.1946) adopts the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his contemporaries as 'a painter of modern life' to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted on to light boxes that diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations.Wall is foremost among the pioneering...

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent out a 'telegram' in the guise of a urinal signed R. Mutt. When it arrived at its destination a good forty years later, it was both celebrated and vilified as proclaiming that anything could be art; from that point on, the whole Western art world reconfigured itself as 'post-Duchamp'. Duchamp’s Telegram offers a reading of...