This is my review in the VUB LSTS annual book of the year review for year 2019, 30.12.2019
Because I consider a ‘best of’ books’ list for any given period sensitive personal data (to me, much more sensitive than any on the respective GDPR list, thus empirically proving how outdated their idea is), I am only going to discuss what I am reading right now (by itself a selection, because I am one to stop reading a book midway if it ceases to interest me): Pierre Cabanne’s ‘Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp’.
The book is as much an official catalogue of Duchamp’s art as an exercise on morals, the latter being of more interest to me. As with any book by now, it reads better with ready access to the internet both for lookup and for note-keeping purposes.
What never ceases to astonish me page after page after page is that both the interviewer-author and the artist have an unspoken understanding on what exactly is the purpose of the book: Duchamp died a couple of years after the book’s completion.