“When in 1917, Duchamp bought a coat rack on a whim, and, noticing people were tripping over it as it lay on the floor, nailed it there; he trapped the ironies and negations that have thrown such huge shadows on the production of art over the next century. What did he do? He took a prefabricate, manufactured object and removed it from its very purpose; he destroyed its utility. Art became a travesty of context, something you trip over. The authority of the artist is self-parodic, highlighting itself as whim rather than wisdom, conceptual rather than a perfection of technique. The rearticulating of this joke (emphasis added) has led us to a crisis of irony: art seems to function solely as a debacle of context, a suspension and suspicion of traditional modes of expertise in favor [sic] of appropriation, and endless procession of quote marks, the deconstruction of any imaginative act into a triumph of depthless allusion and arch remove. Art becomes the ruination of utility. Music, painting, poetry, performance becoming a kind of purging tantrum, its use disruptive to its own usefulness, has bequeathed us an unavoidable irony toward the possibility of any art’s sincerity; it is the rupture of elsewhere in any sense of belonging.”— Dean Young in The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
