The Readymade and the Rest of Us

In 1987, the French artist Philippe Thomas founded a fictitious agency called readymades belong to everyone®. Its premise was elegant and quietly destabilising: clients could purchase the right to be named as the author of his works. Authorship itself became the readymade. The signature — that last bastion of artistic authenticity — was put up for sale.

Thomas was working in the long shadow of Duchamp, but he identified something Duchamp had left unresolved. The readymade had liberated the object; Thomas liberated the name. If a urinal could become art through selection and context, why not a collector? Why not anyone?

The readymade has always been about the frame, not the thing. Duchamp did not make the bottle rack or the snow shovel. He chose them, titled them, and placed them. The gesture of selection — curatorial, deliberate, charged with intention — was the work. What surrounded the object gave it meaning.

This is not simply a historical footnote. It remains the operating logic behind much of what the art market values and what collectors pursue. The exhibition catalogue is not the exhibition, yet it is often what remains. The invitation card was printed in the hundreds, distributed, mostly discarded — and yet the copies that survive carry the full weight of the moment they announced. The press release, the price list, the artist’s proof: none of these were meant to last. Their survival is what gives them force.

At The New Rare, we take this seriously. The things we offer are not always the primary object. Sometimes they are the material that surrounded it: printed matter, ephemera, the accompanying copy with something laid in that was never meant to stay. We select according to the same logic Thomas applied to authorship: the frame matters, context is inseparable from the work, and what belongs to everyone is, in the end, still shaped by selection.