From Fountain to Moleskine

Art and Law

Editors-in-Chief

Tiziana Andina (University of Turin)

Gianmaria Ajani (University of Turin)
Werner Gephart (University of Bonn)

Associate Editors

Angela Condello (University of Roma Tre and University of Turin)

Enrico Terrone (University of Turin)

Editorial Board

Mark Antaki (McGill University)

Emanuele Conte (University of Roma Tre)
David Davies (McGill University)
Alessandra Donati (University of Milano Bicocca)
Thomas Dreier (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) and University of Freiburg)
Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin)
Pierpaolo Forte (Museo Madre, Naples and University of Sannio)
Peter Goodrich (Cardozo School of Law)
Paolo Heritier (University of Turin)
Desmond Manderson (Australian National University)
Sabine N. Meyer (University of Osnabrück)
Stewart Motha (University of Birkbeck School of Law)
Alberto Oddenino (University of Turin)
Greta Olson ( Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen)
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Westminster School of Law)
Reinold Schmücker (University of Münster)
Peter Schneck (University of Osnabrück)
Eva Schürman (Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg)
John Searle (University of California at Berkeley)
Alberto Voltolini (University of Turin)
Michel Wieviorka (École des hautes études en sciences sociales)

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 From Fountain to
Moleskine
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Producibility

By

Maurizio Ferraris

LEIDEN | BOSTON
This paperback book edition is simultaneously published as issue 2.4 (2019) of Art and Law,
DOI:10.1163/24684309-12340006.

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Contents

From Fountain to Moleskine. The Work of Art in the Age of Its

Technological Producibility 1
Maurizio Ferraris
Abstract 1
Keywords 2
1 Pen, Pencil, Pen Drive 2
1.1 Labour Avant-Garde 2
1.2 Work of Art and Reproducibility 5
1.3 The Contract in Art 12
2 Mona Lisa: The Canon 18
2.1 Article 1. Art Is the Class of Artworks 18
2.2 Article 2. Artworks Are Primarily Physical Objects 19
2.3 Article 3. Artworks Are Social Objects 22
2.4 Article 4. Artworks Can Accidentally Cause Knowledge 22
2.5 Article 5. Artworks Necessarily Arouse Feelings 23
2.6 Article 6. Artworks Are Things Pretending to Be People 23
3 Fountain: The Break 23
3.1 Article 1. Anything Can Be a Work of Art 24
3.2 Article 2. Fine Arts Are No Longer Fine 26
3.3  Article 3. The Quality of the Artwork Is Guaranteed by the
Market 32
3.4 Article 4. There Is No Money Back Guarantee 34
4 Brillo Box: The Reconciliation 39
4.1 Article 1. Looks Matter 39
4.2 Article 2. Not Anything Can Be a Work of Art 40
4.3 Article 3. The Work of Art Is Mainly a Thing 43
4.4 Article 4. The Commodity Is the Exemplary Thing 46
5 Moleskine: The Fusion 53
5.1 Article 1. The Object Is Not Enough, You Need Design 56
5.2 Article 2. Design Is Creactivity 58
5.3 Article 3. The Web Requires a Copernican Revolution 65
5.4 Article 4. Commodities Should Be Treated as Documents 68
5.5 Article 5. Documents Are the New Commodity 74
5.6 Article 6. Creactivity Solves the Mystery of the Commodity 80
Bibliography 83
From Fountain to Moleskine
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Producibility

Maurizio Ferraris
University of Turin, Italy
[email protected]

Abstract

Photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and ever since that moment
painters have been asking what they are there for. Everyone has their own strategy.
Some say they do not paint what is there, but their impressions. Others paint things
that are not seen in the world, and therefore cannot be photographed, because they
are abstractions. Others yet exhibit urinals in art galleries. This may look like the end
of art but, instead, it is the dawn of a new day, not only for painting but – this is the
novelty – for every form of art, as well as for the social world in general and for indus-
try, where repetitive tasks are left to machines and humans are required to behave like
artists.

Keywords

contemporary art – technological reproducibility – documedia revolution –

documentality – contractual negotiation

© Maurizio Ferraris, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004407589_002

2 Ferraris

1 Pen, Pencil, Pen Drive

1.1 Labour Avant-Garde

1.1.1 The Visionary
On 15 May 1871, Arthur Rimbaud addressed to Paul Demeny the so-called
“Lettre du voyant”: the poet is a visionary and a prophet who sees into the pro-
found reality of things. If anyone ever found Plato’s criticisms of poets exagger-
ated (poets lie too much, poets do not know what they are saying, poets claim
to teach how to lead armies and to govern ships but have never done either
thing), this letter would probably make them reconsider their position. Indeed,
in it a 17-year-old boy claims to explain the world through art. It is difficult not
to grasp the pathetic disagreement between the scale of his ambition and the
modesty of the evidence he presents: on the one hand, the promise of solv-
ing the mysteries of the world; on the other (and I am only quoting the major
and universally acclaimed cases) a lady with an enigmatic smile, or an unhap-
pily married woman who commits suicide, or a symphony that goes da da da
dum … This impression seems to be strengthened if we move from classical
or romantic art forms to the art of the twentieth century. Why should a box of
soap pads be a cause for reflection? What great idea is supposed to lie behind
a urinal? What world are they supposed to be showing?
Well, strange as it may seem, avant-garde art knows how to answer these
questions better than classical and romantic art. After all, Leonardo, Flaubert,
or Beethoven did not need to answer philosophical questions: it was enough
for them to produce a work that no machine could ever make. A work that,
hopefully, would be appreciated and judged beautiful. At a certain point, how-
ever, machines entered the scene, or rather, they were no longer just mills,
looms and workshop devices but came into everybody’s life, making hand-
craft obsolete. In particular, photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth
century, and ever since that moment painters have been asking what they
are there for. Everyone has their own strategy. Some say they do not paint what
is there, but their impressions. Others paint things that are not seen in the
world, and therefore cannot be photographed, because they are abstractions.
Others yet exhibit urinals in art galleries. This may look like the end of art but,
instead, it is the dawn of a new day, not only for painting but – this is the nov-
elty – for every form of art, as well as for the social world in general and for
industry, where repetitive tasks are left to machines and humans are required
to behave like artists.
From Fountain to Moleskine 3

1.1.2 The Factory Worker

This supposedly prophetic nature of art appears to be unfounded, unless em-
phasis is given to perspiration rather than inspiration, so to speak: the true
novelty and the true vision of the future do not lie in the idea alone, but – as
Duchamp put it – in the fact that it is a new idea for an object, e.g. for a urinal.
A work of art is the solution to a problem.1 And this problem, rather than con-
ceptual, is technical. The question “what are painters there for if there are pho-
tographers?” is much more like “how can we increase consumption without
increasing inflation” than like “how can there be synthetic a priori judgments?”.
And as in the case of inflation, and unlike that of a priori judgments, the an-
swer lies not in a theory but in practical action.
What makes art truly prophetic is not a Pentecostal descent of the spirit, a
mysterious and mystical inspiration, but rather the creative answer to emer-
gencies that come from technology and to possibilities that can be incorpo-
rated into objects. The avant-garde has mainly to do with labour. In the 1930s,
Ernst Jünger took up Nietzsche’s idea that workers had to live and feel like sol-
diers and, in view of the experience of the 1914–18 war of materials, added that
soldiers would have to live and feel like workers in turn.2 However, he forgot
that artists were also part of this transformation. The avant-garde, which for
Hitler was degenerate art, was in fact a worker avantgarde, in which the art-
ist, just like the factory worker, was measured with the generalized iterability
characteristic of the industrial revolution. Today we are in a better position to
grasp this transformation, in which art anticipates the future of commodity,
capital and industry.
Recall the nature of the problem. Automation meant that artists had to re-
sort to alternative strategies with respect to the manual production of objects.
And the answer consisted in a rewriting of the contract between artist and
user, which, in the end, with Duchamp, was radicalized in negativity: anything
can be a work of art. It is therefore appropriate to see a breach of the contract
in him rather than in his predecessors – impressionists and abstractionists,
who in fact did not have any heirs, while Duchamp still has many. This passage
is often interpreted as a transition from craft to concept. Art no longer needs
hands and tools, the artist works with thought. However, this implies underes-
timating the fact that even the most abstract thought needs technical appara-
tuses (unless one is an idiot savant, even simple arithmetic operations require

1 As noted by George Kubler in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.
2 E. Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932), Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2017.
4 Ferraris

paper, a pen or an abacus; the development of ideas requires that they be fixed,
shared and transmitted, etc.). Also, more than a passage from technology to
thought, in art as well as in other fields, what’s happening is the elaboration
of new expressive techniques. Which in the visual arts consisted in going from
the pencil for reproduction to the hammer for destruction or construction – or
rather, indeed, to the pen, and today to the pen drive. What are the pen and the
pen drive for? Writing essays? Not necessarily. More simply, they are there to
make plans and renegotiate contracts.

1.1.3 The Designer

The avant-garde is not the emanation of the spirit from matter, as per the
Hegelian interpretation of romantic art (which I define “aesthetic pentecos-
talism”). Rather it arises from the unfolding of the constructive, and above
all iterative, reproductive and distributive possibilities offered by a fully de-
ployed technology (aesthetic emergentism). Development has always revolved
around a technical apparatus, never around a concept. The avant-garde shift
was not an action or a carefully planned strategy, but a reaction to reproduc-
ibility. With this reaction, art, far from dying, became instead the general form
of the industrial product.
The avant-garde often appears to be empty pretentiousness. Yet, strange as
it may seem, it is actually able to anticipate, expose, and foresee more than tra-
ditional art. Duchamp or Warhol followed (unconsciously, of course, but not
even Leonardo, Flaubert or Beethoven had a detailed plan) a totally different
strategy. Everything can be produced by machines in an industrial process, so
manual dexterity is pointless. What matters is the idea, or more exactly the
design, the project that underlies the work, the conception of the economic
and social system in which this work can cause scandal or be appreciated, and
therefore can be considered a work of art.
So if Flaubert and Beethoven were quality craftsmen who were only expect-
ed to show craftsmanship, and if the engineering, political or scientific skills of
Leonardo and Goethe constituted an accessory merit compared to the crafts-
manship of drawing or composing verses, in the case of Duchamp or Warhol
everything is concentrated in the idea, since the rest is done by machines (in
the case of the urinal) or by other craftsmen paid to reproduce what is done by
machines (in the case of Brillo Box). And the idea is not the vision of the vision-
ary, as posited by adolescent Rimbaud, but trade and the forms that the idea
must take, as shown by a later Rimbaud trafficking in Aden. So, technology
does not disappear: we are not dealing with the dematerialization or sublima-
tion of an artwork that becomes pure spirit. Rather, technology is transformed,
From Fountain to Moleskine 5

bringing to the fore the link between artwork and reproducibility as well as be-
tween artwork and contract. The two points to be examined in order to under-
stand the question of the avant-garde are therefore the link between artwork
and reproduction and the connection between concept and contract.

1.2 Work of Art and Reproducibility

So let’s start from the link between work of art and reproducibility. Photography
as a low-cost source of reproducibility renders figurative painting useless and
paves the way to abstractionism, impressionism, expressionism (all forms of
deconstruction of the now guaranteed form of faithful reproduction). This is
precisely the thesis posited by Walter Benjamin, who sees reproducibility as
the fundamental technical emergence to which modern art reacts. His thesis
is makes sense, but it must be integrated with at least three considerations.
In the first place, the artwork is ontologically dependent on a form of repro-
ducibility (I define this circumstance ontological reproducibility). Secondly,
the part of an artwork that can be reproduced can vary – trivially, a book is
reproduced differently from a painting (I define this circumstance epistemo-
logical reproducibility). Thirdly, the technical modalities of reproduction are
factually and conceptually different (I define this circumstance technological
reproducibility).
The appeal to technology seems especially necessary precisely because
many theories of art have focused on the epistemological content of the art-
works, on what we know or think we know about them, and on what they let us
know, or we believe they let us know (this is the case with Hegelian or Marxist
aesthetics); or else many theories have favored the ontological status of art-
works (think of the aesthetics of Danto or Goodman),3 that is, they answered
the question: what is a work of art? It’s true, there have been aesthetics that,
like those proposed by Pareyson4 and Eco,5 have valued the technological com-
ponent (formativity, the practical action at the basis of the art), but they have
seen it as prevailing over the ontology of the artwork (which becomes “open”,
that is, subordinate to interpretation).
In the perspective I defend here, instead, the three components are close-
ly linked: the work, as a physical and social object, has a given recognizable
ontological structure, as we will see in the next chapter. It also has its own

3 N. Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs Merrill Company,
1968.
4 L. Pareyson, Estetica. Teoria della formatività (1954), Milano: Bompiani, 1988.
5 U. Eco, Opera aperta (1962), Milano: Bompiani, 2012.
6 Ferraris

epistemology, which is not so much what the artworks say about the world
(a chemistry textbook is a much more accurate teaching tool than Goethe’s
Elective Affinities) but rather what we know about the works (that is, the very
ambitious sphere of artistic expertise). But ontology and epistemology are re-
lated by technology. How so? Very simply, the innovative character of an art-
work is essentially the result of doing, of a competence that not necessarily
(indeed, almost never) comes with understanding; technological innovation
produces the artwork, which is the ontological manifestation of artistic pro-
duction; and the epistemological reflection undertakes to bring out precisely
the innovative content that manifests itself in the ontology of the work of art.
It should not be surprising, therefore, if a technological transformation, that
is, the automation of representation through photography, has had such ex-
tensive consequences on the ontology and on the epistemology of art. What
I would like to draw attention to, however, is that this effect has been all the
stronger, ontologically, because the ontology, epistemology and technology of
the artwork imply an essential link with recording (which in turn is the condi-
tion of possibility of reproduction). Let’s have a closer look.

1.2.1 Ontological Reproducibility

In a first sense, the definition of “artwork” involves a form of reproducibility.
Something that is not reproducible cannot be an artwork. The first form of
ontological reproducibility is recordability as a permanent feature of the work,
which makes it an object and not an event. I call “objecthood” this constitutive
intervention of recording in the ontological status of the work. In this sense,
the artwork follows the general rule of social objects, that is “Object = Recorded
Act”. The social object is the result of a social act (involving at least two agents;
in the case of art, a producer and a client or user) that has the characteristic of
being recorded somewhere, even if only the mind of producers and users. So
the hypothesis that I defend is that art (of all time) is a social object like any
other and responds to the law “Artwork = Recorded Act”. This formula can be
illustrated as follows:

Object Act Document

Promise To promise Memory

Wedding To sign Register
Symphony To compose Sheet
From Fountain to Moleskine 7

The object is what is referred to (“I promise I will give you 5 euros”, “X and
Y are married”, Beethoven’s Ninth in that it is different from the Eighth …);
the act is what produces the object; and the document is what makes the act
permanent.
The presence of reproducibility since the classical age suggests that an im-
manent characteristic in the artwork is normality, which, again, has to do with
a kind of intrinsic reproducibility, a transcendental reproducibility to which
Benjamin does not seem to have paid attention. The reflection on art must be
based on normality, which is mostly the form of art. Focusing on the exception
(the deviation from the norm) or on excellence (perfection that is almost never
achieved) involves a misunderstanding of the actual development of art. This
misunderstanding has become the norm ever since Hegel, and has distorted
the understanding of the avant-garde. In agreement with the aesthetic reflec-
tion from Aristotle to Kant, the point is rather to start from the aesthetic norm
(following the perspective that I have previously defined “aesthetic normal-
ism”). Aesthetic extraordinaryism claims to find the norm of art in what ex-
ceeds the norm, and therefore traces the analysis of art back to the subjectivity
of the analyst, who will call great whatever they happen to like. Aesthetic what-
everism claims (as we will see speaking of Duchamp) that anything can be a
work of art. Instead, aesthetic normalism assumes that the artwork reflects the
logic of exemplarity, which bears the principle of repeatability.
I admit that at first it may seem frustrating to treat an artwork not as an
extraordinary entity, but as the prototype of the most ordinary of things, next
to screwdrivers, beers and guns. However, ultimately there is no reason to be
disappointed. Aristotle defines poetry as more philosophical than history, be-
cause the latter describes the contingent (dealing with what has actually hap-
pened, which can also be extraordinary), while the former grasps the universal
(what can happen, the likely, the ordinary)6: in so doing, he implies or postu-
lates exactly this averageness, and the theory of art as imitation only reinforces
the normalist approach to an ontology of art. (Almost) on the other side of
history, Proust writes that the task of the work of art is not to show us wonders,
but to serve as a telescope to grasp the general laws of life.7
This is particularly clear in visual art. The urinal is undoubtedly a very ordi-
nary object, but so are a triptych or a statue: compared to urinals, polyptychs
and statues are only rarer, but this is a quantitative consideration that does
not affect the ontological quality of the work. And let’s not forget that rarity
is a relative phenomenon on which it is inadvisable to build an ontology: in a

6 Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b, 4–7.

7 M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1921–1923), London: Penguin, 1996, vol. III.
8 Ferraris

picture gallery, urinals are rarer than in the bathrooms of a Munich brewery,
but paintings and urinals still have, as it were, almost all their chromosomes in
common. In other words, consider what Hemingway told Fitzgerald when the
latter told him that the rich are different from other people: “Of course they
are: they have more money” (which is to say: they are equal to other people,
except they have a lot of money, which is ontologically rather irrelevant).
The normalist thesis therefore rests on two assumptions. The first is that art
constitutes a vague but not arbitrary territory, in which things come and go,
and artworks are placed next to notebooks, the wheel, the club, tables, chairs,
polenta, identity cards, driving licenses, booklets, and fake banknotes. But
not, for example, next to numbers and theorems, which – as we shall see – are
not and cannot be artworks. Nor next to pure psychological acts devoid of
external expression. The second assumption is that in art, what matters, are
not the exceptions, but the small things of average taste that furnish our
existence – works that are so so, and judged, I add, by people that are so so, i.e.
people who are not nor want to be experts. Suffice it to consider the case of
arte povera, which was born as an avant-garde movement linked to Duchamp’s
break, and which became a sub-aesthetic category of nineteenth-century-like
furniture. This explains why it is that art can merge with commodities, as we
will see at the end of this essay.
Just like heroic ethics, sublime aesthetics does not make much sense. Kant
rightly recommends not to preach nobility in moral treatises,8 since the mere
result of such high and unattainable models is to justify all kinds of baseness.
This is the impression that, despite everything, one has while reading, for ex-
ample, Adorno’s Introduction to the Sociology of Music,9 in which every type of
listener appears to be more or less defective or limited, and art an unlikely and
very boring path to holiness. Now, if Adorno is right, the only authentic listener
is one who is versed in all the history of music, including dodecaphony, to the
point of being able to perform the compositions he listens to; therefore, those
who flock to rock concerts or to the Salzburg Festival, or those who listen to
Aida in the Arena of Verona, are all victims of a cognitive hallucination, where
they believe they are listening to music but they are actually not. Well, if that’s
the case, then one might as well listen to trash. This is why modern music,
contrary to Adorno’s prediction, has changed, becoming kinder, and above all

8 “Only I wish they would spare the youth examples of so-called noble (suprameritorious) ac-
tions, which our sentimental writings bandy about so much, and to stake everything merely
on duty and on the worth that a human being can and must give himself in his own eyes”.
I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Cambridge (MA): Hackett, 2002, p. 193.
9 T. W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962), Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000.
From Fountain to Moleskine 9

realizing that innovation took place in the technical reproducibility typical of

the low-level or medium-level music that Adorno ostracized.
Normality is the other side of normativity, which consists in the fact that
there are works that impose themselves as exemplary, that is, they provide a
norm by which normal works must abide. This circumstance is particularly
evident in the peculiar example we call masterpiece. What is a masterpiece? In
the artisan schools of the past, the masterpiece was the work that the student
had to produce to show his competence. We can therefore assume that most of
the time it was a fairly ordinary work, a bit like a school essay, that is, anything
but a masterpiece in the current sense of the term. Real masterpieces are so
called because they are placed at the beginning of a chain of imitations, and
perhaps even invent a new genre. And the implicit assumption of these imita-
tions is that they can never become masterpieces, and that, if they did, they
would cease to belong to the previous series, and would give life to a new one.
The opposite of the masterpiece, perhaps the failed masterpiece, is the type:
a minor result of the logic of exemplarity.10 There is a sense in which “exem-
plary” means “typical”, and it is no longer a compliment (except, perhaps, in
the expression “typical cuisine” or similar, in which the typicality constitutes
a value in itself). Expressions like “the typical French” or “the typical bureau-
crat” are not flattering. Perhaps a paradoxical compliment can be found in the
expression “typical imbecile”: the insult lies in the word “imbecile”, and
the word “typical” perhaps attenuates it; this is not the case with the phrase
“classic asshole”, where the banality of evil appears to be aggravating.

1.2.2 Epistemological Reproducibility

In a second sense, the part of an artwork that can be reproduced varies, and
in this case we are dealing with modifications of the status of the artwork that
I define “epistemological modifications”, because they concern the ways in
which the work is known by the user. Here it helps to resort to the distinction
between act, content and object, which I propose to reformulate (since I refer
to properties that manifest themselves in the object, rather than in the subject)
as a distinction between act, style and theme. The act is the mode of produc-
tion (in this case: singing, writing, dancing, sculpting …); style is the individual

10 Jacopo Domenicucci sent me this comment, for which I thank him: “The model / master-
piece / type series makes me think of the three French novelists who play each with one
of the three terms, respectively Stendhal / Flaubert / Balzac. The first is often asked if his
characters correspond to literary models and plays on their differences from them (con-
sider ‘notre héros n’était pas tellement héros’, or the fall from the horse in the Chartreuse,
right in front of the ladies); Flaubert is obsessed with the idea of producing masterpieces
(letters), and Balzac talks about types on every page (“l’était le type même du …”)”.
10 Ferraris

way in which this procedure is implemented (Mozart’s Requiem Mass and

Verdi’s are different although they involve the same expressive medium
and the same theme); and the theme, that is, the common object that is ex-
pressed through artistic practice. Each of these elements can be reproduced,
and in different ways. A work can be reproduced in its act, in its production
process, as in a performance that is repeated. This reproducibility of the
production process, on the other hand, is the basis of artisanal production,
which presupposes precisely the reproducibility of the act (think of the mass
production, but on a manual basis, of amphorae in antiquity) as well as the
transmissibility of the production technique underlying the act (think of
the production of flints and the transmissibility and evolution of these tech-
niques over millennia).
Secondly, one can reproduce the style, the manner, of a work of art. This
is the most intrinsically interesting process. Though this may seem paradoxical,
the singularity of the artwork is guaranteed by a series of iterations. Ultimately,
there is nothing surprising here: even the words I am writing at this very mo-
ment claim to be singular, that is, these and not others, and with a meaning
that is protected by the norms on intellectual property. Yet they are the result
of a code, the Italian language, which is understandable only to the extent that
it is iterable (words have a stable meaning, the syntactic structure takes on a
given order, etc.). This iterability finds its manifestation in a philosophically in-
teresting phenomenon that unites documents and works of art: the signature.11
In effect, by signing, we give life to something that is (1) absolutely unique: the
signature must be the one placed at that moment, on that date; (2) repeatable
in principle: if I kept changing my signature, I could not sign, and that is why,
for example, the bank asks us to deposit our signature; (3) completely private:
no one can sign in my place, with my signature: at most they can be delegated
by me to sign with their own; (4) essentially public: if I created a signature that
I only used for myself, while using another one in public, the real signature
would be the second. Now, the iterability of the content rests precisely on this
circumstance, and it is a phenomenon that came long before contemporaneity.
Thirdly, one can reproduce the theme of a work of art. This reproducibility
of the theme – which is one of the most ordinary phenomena in the artistic
field – is linked with I said about normativity. If there can be so many ver-
sions of Oedipus, Stabat Mater, the Flight into Egypt, etc. it is because objects,
as general schemes of the work, are necessarily lesser in number than their
realizations.

11 
J. Derrida, “Signature Event Context” (1971), in Id., Limited Inc. (1972), Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1988.
From Fountain to Moleskine 11

1.2.3 Technological Reproducibility

In a third sense, the ways in which a work of art can be reproduced are mul-
tiple, and each of them obviously has different consequences on the work’s
ontology. Technology, in fact, is essentially recording, iteration and serializa-
tion. These three functions, confused in Benjamin’s notion of “reproducibility”,
deserve to be distinguished.
The first is recording. Every artwork is a process characterised by recording
precisely because it consists of the fixation of an act. The growth of record-
ing has particularly visible effects in phonography. Unwritten or improvised
forms of art become artworks (i.e. recorded acts), so they can enjoy both a
diffusion that goes beyond the local sphere, and an archive that triggers an
evolutionary dialectic. This is what happened in the recording of music, which
generated pop art (local art that was globalized thanks to the record industry)
and triggered processes of quotation, emulation, and progressivity that were
previously only possible for classical music (i.e. for music whose only distinc-
tive feature, compared to other forms of music, was the property of being
written).
The second is iteration, which is the reason why an original can be repro-
duced. It is worth making a point in this respect. Moderns have not discovered
technical reproducibility and conceptuality any more than Columbus discov-
ered America – the Vikings had already arrived there. The Mona Lisa glimpsed
from afar, behind three rows of visitors, at the Louvre, is not weakened by its
endless reproductions, by its spread on the web, by the infamous mustache, or
by finding it on kitchen aprons and coffee cups: it is strengthened by all these
things. It becomes something that, with involuntary accuracy, is defined an
“icon of contemporary society”. This does not only apply to traditional works,
hyper-canonized by their simulacra, but above all to contemporary ones, born
in the full age of reproducibility. Notice this. If a neon tube can become an ob-
ject of aesthetic contemplation it is because the work of art, far from losing its
aura and becoming secularized, is today essentially a work of aura: the result of
an all-spiritual consecration for which any object whatsoever can be a work
of art, museums are temples and visitors are pilgrims and penitents.
The third is serialization, which is a process of multiple reproduction. Once
a work is made, it can be reproduced, not just one, but n times. This is not
simply the indefinite reproduction of an original conceived as unique (say, the
Mona Lisa), but also the elaboration of works conceived from the beginning
to be reproducible, just like commodities in industrial production. This is the
case with the novel, which is produced by being printed, costs much less than
the manuscript, and is aimed at a bourgeois and popular audience. Since re-
producibility makes it possible to sell specimens at a low cost, it is no longer
12 Ferraris

necessary to provide the rhyme as mnemotechnical expedient for the popular

diffusion of verbal compositions, as happened at the time of poems (whose
last manifestations characteristically took place in the first two centuries of
the press, but which essentially sounded like quotes).

1.3 The Contract in Art

Once the work of art has been defined in its relation to reproducibility, let’s
move on to the contract. What is usually interpreted as conceptual or ­spiritual12
in art is in fact contractual. Art has always tried to deny its contract: think of
the polemic against the units of time, place and action that made up the con-
tractual requirements of the tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics. This controversy
became particularly strong when technical reproducibility generated the
avant-garde. In this way, the avant-garde did not bring to light the spirit or
the concept, but the letter or the contract: it isolated and emphasized its es-
sential characters.

1.3.1 The Concept as Contract

It is said that twentieth-century art is conceptual, but this implies doing in-
justice to the previous art. Cave paintings contain all the knowledge of their
age; pyramids showcase an astronomy, a political economy and a theology.
And in Las Meninas by Velázquez there is just enough to inspire from page 19
to page 31 of the Gallimard edition of The Order of Things.13 So in what sense
would Duchamp’s bottle-rack be more conceptual than the School of Athens by
Raphael, who, with a simple gesture of Aristotle’s half-raised hand, illustrates
the mediocrity of ethical virtues? The “concept” of conceptual art, on closer
inspection, is a legal notion. Here, conceptual art is a contractual art: it reckons
with the economic datum (the art world is above all the art market) and at the
same time tries to broaden the definition of art, renegotiating the implicit con-
tract between customer, author and user, to the point of becoming essentially
a contract in itself. Indeed, the only concept with which conceptual-contrac-
tual art works is, after all, the law of art: the canonical idea that an artwork is
a physical thing, with an author and some aesthetic appeal. Therefore, it
is necessary to contradict the canons, to circumvent them, to enlarge them, to
dismantle them, and the whole thing, rather perversely, occurs through an in-
strument that is traditionally associated with the canon and with legality: the
contract. So, there aren’t great concepts at stake, in the end. These are rather

12 V. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), New York, Guggenheim Foundation,
1946.
13 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1966), New York: Pantheon Book, 1970.
From Fountain to Moleskine 13

weak concepts. Contracts, in fact: brocards, pandects, latinorum. Thus, in the

couple “law and art”,14 legality is not extrinsic, as would be, say, the attempt to
explain artworks starting from the pathologies of the authors in the couple
“psychiatry and art”.
Great are the powers of the contract, which enjoys a performative dimen-
sion and allows us to do things with words, in agreement with John L. Austin15:
the spoken expression “I do” at a wedding is not only descriptive, but produces
two new social objects, a husband and a wife. This systematically happens in
documents, which attest, document, archive, and name, according to a modal-
ity that I think can be traced back to the two typologies (on which I will return
at the end of this book) of “weak document” (as recording of a fact) and “strong
document” (as recording of an act). To be clear, all the artists who record per-
formances otherwise destined to disappear produce weak documents, and the
same happens when the artists exploit the aesthetic appeal of paperwork and
the magical power of the archive, like Gordon-Matta Clark, who creates col-
lages with legal papers and land registries.
But documents can also be used in a stronger form, to literally produce acts:
thanks to strong documents, Theodore Fu Wan contractually changed his name
to Saskatche Wan, Alix Lambert married five different wives in six months,
and Maria Eichhorn conceived of her artistic activity as drafting contracts to
protect urban areas threatened by speculation. And the attributive power of
documents is at the core of practices such as those of Stefan Brüggemann and
Robert Barry, who have agreed that authorship of two of their artworks will be
transferred back and forth between them at the end of every five-year period.
Likewise, by exploiting copyright laws, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe ac-
quired the exploitation rights of a Manga figure. The contract can go as far as
the staging of a subversion of rules that are no longer those of art, but of the
penal code, like for example when the artist gives the order to rob a supermar-
ket or as in “Corruption Contract” by the Superflex group, whose buyer – in
clear exception to the theory of beauty as a symbol of moral good – agree to
engage in activities of extortion or corruption for the contract period.
One can go even further and create artworks by mere contractual agree-
ment. Already in 1958 Yves Klein had created “Le vide”, an exhibition without
works, in which a contract for the sale of an “immaterial pictorial sensitivi-
ty zone” was issued, and much later, in 2010, Étienne Chambaud realized an

14 To quote a book by Alessandra Donati, Law and Art. Diritto e arte contemporanea (2012),
Milano: Giuffrè. See also the book she edited with Gianmaria Ajani: G. Ajani, A. Donati
(ed. by) I diritti dell’arte contemporanea (2011), Torino: Allemandi.
15 J. L. Austin, How to do things with words, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1962.
14 Ferraris

artwork consisting only of contracts, certificates and declarations of authen-

ticity. Likewise, the contract can transform even the author into an artwork, as
in the provision by which Jill Magid gave a specialized company the mandate
to transform her charred remains into a diamond. But the peak was reached
perhaps by Robert Morris in 1963, whose contract consists of two parts: on the
left, a lead plate with a few lines engraved on it, on the right a declaration in
which the artist withdraws the character of artwork from the artwork, transfer-
ring the artistic aura onto the withdrawal document.

1.3.2 Document Art

Kant said that the main character of art is to make people think. But what
thoughts do these works arouse? Essentially juridical questions. For example:
is issuing instructions enough to be called an author? It is certainly enough
to be called despotic: Seth Siegelaub, for example, prescribes in the execution
contract of his works that even the slightest change involves an irreversible al-
teration of the works themselves. One can be even more despotic, and almost
perverse: this is the case with Daniel Buren, who strictly abstains from signing
or authenticating his works. Or else: is the curator of an exhibition or a muse-
um an author, given that their responsibility goes far beyond the management
of an exhibition space? (For his part, an artist, Maurizio Cattelan, co-curated
the Berlin Biennial in 2006 with Massimiliano Gioni). Is the performance really
an immaterial artwork that escapes the market? So it was in its original ideol-
ogy, but now the world is full of performance recordings. Indeed, the world
is full of documents, as happens in the philosophical conversations with Ian
Wilson, of which what’s left is only a sheet of paper with a signature. And it is
also full of “scripta”, works that are assembled and dismantled and come with
instructions for use. Or artworks that consist only of documents, such as the
complaint presented by Cattelan to the police headquarters of Forlì, reporting
the theft from his car of an invisible work of art.
As all these examples show, contemporary art brings to the fore a character
proper to the artworks of all times and types: a document dimension. This has
always defined the horizon of art, as it is the nature of all social objects. So, like
any other social object, the artwork is defined by a law that I have formalized
in terms of “Object = Recorded Act”. Therefore, the contractual dimension is
not a break with the essence of traditional art: the latter, as such, postulates
cooperation (and therefore an implicit contract) between author and user.16
The full realization of expectations, even in traditional art, often involves a

16 This cooperation was theorized by Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula (1979), Milano: Bompiani,
2001.
From Fountain to Moleskine 15

surprise factor, a slight transgression of the norm, to bring authority and nov-
elty in those arts that (unlike strongly codified traditions) allow for it. The con-
temporary variant is precisely the contractual thrill, in which the artist feels the
more revolutionary the more they develop sophisticated lawyer tricks. Here
the transgression and the surprise become the priority element of the work,
and the bureaucratic frisson takes the place of other elements (information,
emotion, aesthetic satisfaction) that were constitutive of traditional artworks.
The transformation of the world into a work of art, which was yearned
by the romantics, actually took place in the paperwork, with which art really
comes down to life. The bartender who does not give you a receipt for your
beer is potentially an absolute performer, but the event is even more sublime
and complete if accompanied by a fiscal investigation. We are all waiting for
the moment when a resident’s meeting will become a work of art, whose
vestige – the minutes – will be hung on people’s walls. In contract art, we find
the realization of Giuseppe Novello’s old vignette which depicts a young man
whose cultured family wanted him to be a composer, but who at night – under
the frowning eyes of a Beethoven bust – expressed his true vocation: accoun-
tancy. And this is far from strange. After all, Jeff Koons worked in the stock
market. And of course the perfection of contract art would be reached if
Cattelan received a chair in commercial law, so as to put to good use the exper-
tise accumulated in his years of artistic militancy.

1.3.3 Nostalgias of the Aura and Merits of Reproducibility

Nearly one hundred years ago, Benjamin argued that technical reproducibility
would lead to a loss of aura,17 of the sense of uniqueness that accompanies
works of art. He referred to the fact that, typically, paintings were replaced by
photographs, and the single piece by many specimens. Fifty years ago, with a
sure instinct, Andy Warhol started taking pictures with a Polaroid and signing
the shots, because in fact, without the negatives, those photos were unique
pieces. But, of course, they were also anomalies, because the ordinary photo
does have a negative and is infinitely reproducible – which is even more the
case with digital photos. Who knows what Benjamin (who died in 1940) and
Warhol (who died in 1987) would have said if they could have foreseen how
vertiginous this reproducibility has grown, now that the image is multiplied
because of the places in which it is reproduced or, more correctly, from which
you can access the Internet. Concretely, if I type “Brillo Box” + “Warhol” on

17 W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936), Grey
Room No. 39, Walter Benjamin’s Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art
(Spring 2010), pp. 11–38.
16 Ferraris

Google I get almost nine thousand results, and if I select the search for images
I find almost three thousand reproductions of Brillo Box, the box of soap pads
exposed by Warhol in 1964 and now considered a pop icon. But if I do this
research on my iPad I have the three thousand images available in another
place, and so if I try on my iPhone. In short: on the same table, at a few centi-
metres’ distance, I have virtually nine thousand images of Brillo Box available,
and twenty-seven thousand sites that talk about it or reproduce it.
Benjamin was right about the way in which art suffers from the impact of
reproducibility. But he could not foresee that, with a change that culminated
in the documedia revolution, art thus anticipated industrial developments.
By “documedia revolution” I mean the union between the institutive power
of documents (the web is the largest archive that history has ever known) and
the dynamism of the media (we are all both receivers and producers of mes-
sages, while until recently we were only receivers), in a framework in which
robotics automates the production of objects just as, almost two centuries ago,
photography automated the reproduction of objects. Now, it is precisely this
circumstance that makes the experience of art an anticipation of both indus-
try and capital.
Benjamin looked back, just like the angel of history. He regretted the loss of
aura, albeit with a less apocalyptic tone than Adorno. In fact, however, there
are intrinsic values in technical reproducibility, which forces artists to think
of alternative strategies, such as that developed by Duchamp (significantly
absent in Benjamin’s reading). And not only that: if we switch from the pho-
tographic reproducibility of images to the reproduction of sounds first with
gramophones and now with the Web, we have an effect that is not of loss of
aura, but of canonization (Jazz or Pop would have ended up like all the previ-
ous kinds of popular music, if there had not been technical reproducibility).
But above all, technical reproducibility can produce a peculiar aura effect,
which derives from the charm of the brand as opposed to the signature, as pop
art demonstrates. Most of all, the ongoing documedia revolution ensures that
the modes of production of the auratic work of art (and above all individual-
ity) become the modes of industrial production, now that the production is no
longer necessarily serial. Thus we have a history of developments in art and in
technology that run parallel, but obviously in a non-harmonious way, in which
the traditional criteria identifying the artwork are called into question.

1.3.4 Identification Criteria

With a cluster classification (as we say today) or a “rhapsodic” classification
(as Kant put it, criticizing the fact that Aristotle derived his categories from
experience, rather than presupposing them) we can isolate six identifying
From Fountain to Moleskine 17

characteristics of an artwork. I chose Mona Lisa because it is generally consid-

ered canonical, especially by tourists who gather to see it at the Louvre without
having tired of seeing it in endless other reproductions and indeed (here is a
topic on which Benjamin has not reflected) eager to see the original precisely
because they have only seen copies so far, so that reproducibility is the creation
rather than the destruction of aura. With respect to this norm, which by defini-
tion has all the criteria identifying the canonical work, two anticanonic works
such as Fountain and Brillo Box differ less than one would think. Above all, they
mark the origin of a new canonicity in a much more imperious way than Mona
Lisa did, as after all it was a painting like many others while Fountain and Brillo
Box started a series of imitations. But what may seem surprising – though, as I
will try to show, it is not – is that even an object of wide distribution and devoid
of artistic ambitions like the Moleskine notebook has four identifying criteria
out of six, exactly like Fountain which (as I will show at end of this book) is its
direct antecedent.

Uniqueness Beauty Uselessness Signature Commodity Document

Mona Lisa x x x x x x
Fountain x x x x
Brillo Box x x x x x
Moleskine x x x x

1.3.5 Break, Reconciliation, Fusion

I now propose to distinguish three phases of renegotiation of the canon: the
readymade, Pop art and, today, the documedia art. These phases, which are
each characterized by an exemplary object, never constituted a radical break
with tradition (nor with the phases that immediately preceded them), and
present significant or at least recognizable elements of continuity with tradi-
tional art, so that there was no break with the general ontology of art. Rather,
these are just variants of the problem posed by reproducibility and its relation-
ship with art, commodities and industry.
The first gesture of the worker avant-garde, which corresponds to Fountain
and the readymade, was the breaking of the contract. The struggle was against
two enemies: the first was reproducibility alongside the idea that works of art
are identified by beauty; the second was the new relationship with the resource
offered by iterability. The second gesture, which corresponds to Brillo Box and
Pop art, was the reconciliation with the pleasant world of commodities. The
18 Ferraris

aura-inducing advantages of iterability and seriality were therefore appreci-

ated, and a more pleasant dialogue with the social world and with the indus-
try was re-established: Lichtenstein decorated Gianni Agnelli’s study, Warhol
turned famous people into icons and above all the commodity was canon-
ized in its intrinsic beauty. Finally, the third gesture, which corresponds to
Moleskine and the documedia revolution, is the fusion between the art world
and that of the commodity as a whole. Design recovers beauty and places it
directly inside the commodity, which becomes the true work of art. But next to
this flashy but punctual phenomenon, a more extensive transformation is tak-
ing place, one that is full of consequences. On the one hand, the production of
customized goods becomes technically feasible, so that commodities are now
treated as artworks were in the period preceding their technical reproducibil-
ity. On the other hand, the real fundamental commodities have now become
documents, that is, big data, and so the goods have the character that Marx at-
tributed to art: the fact of being a relationship between people that manifests
itself through things (instead of hiding behind things, which was the mystery
of the commodity).

2 Mona Lisa: The Canon

This general principle (by which recordability is a condition of the artwork),

underlies my general social ontology.18 Combining it with the normalist theory
of art (by which repeatability is a condition of the artwork), a dozen years ago I
elaborated an ontology of art19 that I re-propose here as a compendium of the
canonical form of art, i.e. as the standard contract that the avant-gardes aim
to renegotiate.

2.1 Article 1. Art Is the Class of Artworks

There is no such thing as a form of the spirit, or art, to which objects corre-
spond. There are some objects, endowed with certain characteristics and not
others, which, under certain circumstances, can assume the status of works
of art. The common denominator of artistic practices – which use different
media, at different times, with different materials and with the most various
purposes – lies in the fact of resolving into works of art, in accordance with
the characters of poiesis. The class of art is broad, but not infinite. As we will
see, it is not true that readymades meant that anything can be a work of art.

18 M. Ferraris, Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (2012), New York: SUNY.
19 M. Ferraris, La fidanzata automatica (2007), Milano: Bompiani.
From Fountain to Moleskine 19

Rather, their point was that a work of art is first and foremost a thing, that is,
something with well-defined characteristics in terms of physical size, temporal
duration, and sensory perceptibility.

2.2 Article 2. Artworks Are Primarily Physical Objects

It may seem very easy to understand that a work of art is first of all a thing, or a
physical object – indeed, this thesis sounds rather obvious. And yet it is not, if
one considers the insistence on the supposed ontological leap between simple
thing and artwork.20 And even the aesthetics that have enhanced the thingly
character of artworks have often been limited to avant-garde experiences,21 as
if, indeed, the thinghood of the artwork was a recent discovery. Artworks are
objects of a certain size, neither too large nor too small, and of a certain dura-
tion, neither too long nor too short. To be precise, therefore, either they are
things or they are related to things, that is, they constitute a subspecies of the
class of physical objects. As physical objects, artworks are necessarily related
to aisthesis: this can be easily verified by trying to replace a concert or an ex-
hibition with their description, or a poem with its paraphrase (the novel is
different, as it can be adapted into a film and translated into a beautiful sum-
mary; however, these would then be different artworks in their own right). I
will dwell a little longer on this article. For any further discussion, I refer the
reader to a book I wrote a long time ago to refocus the debate on aesthetics as
a theory of sensibility.22

2.2.1 Double Sense

Hegel tells us that “sense” is a wonderful word, because it has two opposite
meanings: on the one hand, it indicates the senses – sight, hearing, touch,
smell, and taste – and all that has to do with sensitivity. On the other, it indi-
cates meaning, thought, as when we say “the meaning of life”. And that is why
the senses are doubled, so that the eye is both sight and discernment (having
an eye for something), the ear is both hearing and musical taste, touch is both
the basic sense and delicacy in human relationships, and so on. It should come
as no surprise that aesthetics, i.e. the science that has been dealing with art
for some centuries, takes its name from sensibility (aisthesis in Greek). This

20 M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Martin Heidegger: The Basic Writings. New
York: HarperCollins, 2008. I have analysed the characteristics of this aesthetics – which
I call “extraordinarist” because it confers an extraordinary ontological status to works of
art – in La fidanzata automatica cit., pp. 13–16.
21 A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Cambridge (MA): Harvard
University Press.
22 M. Ferraris, Estetica razionale (1997), Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
20 Ferraris

profound and decisive duplicity explains why a place dedicated to “aesthetics”

can indicate both an academic institution devoted to art philosophy and to
the study of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Goodman, and Derrida … and a place for
tanning and hair removal.
Claiming to break the solidarity between these two poles, and to think that
art would be the greater the further it departed from sensation was the first
mistake that led to the deadlock of Great Conceptual Art, i.e. art that would
be worthy qua Great (i.e. an exception) and qua the expression of a Concept.
But there’s more. Just like in Jane Austen, there is Sense and Sensibility, that is,
another duplicity similar to that of the “marvelous” doubleness of sense. The
idea is very simple. What do we look for when we look at artworks? Feelings,
first of all. Otherwise we would read a treatise. It is not truth that is sought in
art, and art’s reference to beauty (or to the representation of the ugly, of the
horrid, etc.) is explained in this emotional framework.

2.2.2 Aisthesis
Things and artwork necessarily fall under the senses. By this I mean that art-
works, like things, must necessarily be existing objects, existing under the
mode of sensible presence. Thinking of a work of art is not tantamount to
experiencing it, and experiencing a work of art means using certain sensory
channels and not others. The reference to sensibility as a common trait to
things and artworks highlights three main aspects in the definition of a work of
art: the necessity of sensibility in the artistic experience; the fact that sensibil-
ity is characterized by a specific unamendability, that is to say by being so and
not otherwise; and, finally, the ecological character of the artworks – in simple
terms, the fact that artworks (as we shall see when dealing with impossible
artworks) are necessarily on a human scale.

2.2.3 Sensibilia
The reference to sensibility is not accidental in art, and the founder of philo-
sophical aesthetics, the Leibnizian Johann Gottlieb Baumgarten, was far from
wrong to define aesthetics as the science of perfect sensible knowledge.23
What I would like you to notice is that the same identical constraints apply to
the philosophy of art, which, for what I said, is “aesthetic” in the same narrow
sense. Without an object that is sensible and accessible through a certain sen-
sory modality, there would be no artwork, and without artworks there would

23 
According to Baumgarten, aesthetics is defined by the following five modes:
“AESTHETICA (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars
analogi rationis,) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae”, Aesthetica, I, 1750, § 1.
From Fountain to Moleskine 21

be no art. What about conceptual art? Does it not disprove all this? No, because
without a piece of paper displayed in an art gallery containing the concep-
tual work, we would not speak of conceptual art; the true artwork, therefore,
as I recalled in the previous chapter, is the inscription on which the concept
is recorded. The so-called “concept”, therefore, as we have seen, is a contract.
And the contract is a sensible object, since it is the recording of an act, and no
recording can take place in the absence of matter.
Art may be the domain of appearance, the unfaithful copy of the idea or,
positively, the sensible but truthful appearance of the idea – whatever the case,
this appearance must obviously manifest itself to eyes, ears, and touch.24 It is
an essential characterization. A concert does not lose much if heard on the
radio, but an exhibition of paintings becomes completely different through
that medium – in this case, it becomes a description (while the concert re-
mains an execution); moreover, this description is much poorer, for example,
than the radio commentary of a football match, because in the latter case at
least there is a purpose, which the description of an exhibition lacks (what is
being transmitted, in fact, is a set of information and evaluations). The same
linguistic fact, in speech arts like poetry or narrative, manifests a very different
dimension than, for example, in the informative use of language. To realize this
it will suffice to consider that, strictly speaking, if telepathy existed one could
conceive telepathic newspapers, telepathic scientific journals or telepathic
elections, while it seems unlikely that there should be telepathic poems or nov-
els. In fact, a hypothetical telepathic poet would only inform us of a psychic
object (say, the poet contemplating infinity) and not of the specific content
of the representation of that mental state (for example, a hedge in Recanati).
And even assuming that it came directly into our heads, circumventing the cul-
tural industry and the artworld system, and corresponded to the content and
not the object, we would still not deal with something related to feelings
and things, but rather with something that (obviously, for the happy few who
had already experienced it) recalls a mystical illumination.25
Of course, every technical transformation involves changes (and potentially
enrichments) in the experience of art, as widely shown by the web, but physi-
cal constraints are still central both to the enjoyment of the artwork (I will
never really see an exhibition on the phone), and to the same identity of the

24 Later we will see why it is less suitable to manifest itself to taste and smell.
25 Typically, the infusion drunk by Amazonian shamans, the Ayahuasca or yajé, scientifically
called “telepathine” because of the telepathic effects that are attributed to it, is the basis
of religious experiences, not of artistic ones. At most, we can imagine it as a substitute for
e-learning and distance education in general, or of radio and TV – not as an alternative to
museums, novels or even films.
22 Ferraris

artwork (if someone steals my painting it is very different from someone steal-
ing a photograph of it, while the original remains at my house). This, indeed,
is a crucial point. Museums do not merely collect reminders of artists’ ideas,
and a library cannot substituted by its catalog. The very strategies developed in
defense of copyright, which rest on the protection of literal formulations,
confirm the link between physicality and identity of the artistic object,26
which once again proves to be akin to the ordinary object. A classic objection
to the physicality of art, however, sounds like this: when I look at a painting
that depicts Julius Caesar, I only see stains of color, the rest is added by the
spirit that contemplates it. In this regard, though, I would note that what
the spirit adds is only what is already in the picture: one who knew nothing of
Julius Caesar would recognize that particular figure and not another. If then
one decides to paint a pipe and to write “this is not a pipe” under the image,
the fact remains that everyone recognizes it as a pipe (or, in the hypothesis of
a spectator who does not know what a pipe is, a small brown and seemingly
wooden object). So, my idea is that it is absolutely right not to reduce art to
sensation, since we have a lot of sensations and they are not all artistic, but
surely such reductionism is a lesser evil than talking about art without refer-
ring to aisthesis.

2.3 Article 3. Artworks Are Social Objects

As social objects, works of art exist only because there are humans capable of
considering them such. In this sense, unlike physical objects without access to
the social world, artworks are intimately relational entities that depend on the
existence of a society with certain characteristics. Their next of kin, therefore,
are documents. It would make no sense to talk about artworks without human
beings – and of human beings who share our culture or similar cultures. We
can very well imagine cultures where there are no such things as works of art
(and indeed we know of cultures in which there is no sphere of art distinct
from that of religion or that of knowledge). However, we cannot imagine that
a man or woman alone in the world would think of things in terms of works of
art. Artworks, like promises, bets and honorary titles, can only exist in a society,
even if simply the miniature society of two human beings.

2.4 Article 4. Artworks Can Accidentally Cause Knowledge

It is not the fundamental purpose of an artwork to provide knowledge, let
alone true knowledge; nevertheless an artwork can, accidentally, provide it. It

26 I refer the reader to “Problemi di ontologia applicata: la proprietà delle idee”, in A. Bottani
and C. Bianchi (ed. by), Significato e ontologia (2003), Milano: Angeli, pp. 104–115.
From Fountain to Moleskine 23

is therefore true that there are forms of art (for example, narrative or portrai-
ture) that can have a cognitive scope, and it is true that there are civilizations
of which we only have their artistic productions, which therefore constitute
the only knowledge we have of them. But this does not mean in any way that
knowledge is the primary function of art. It is certainly possible to learn some-
thing about Ireland from Joyce, but if knowing Ireland is the goal it is cheaper
and more effective to buy a travel guide or read an essay.

2.5 Article 5. Artworks Necessarily Arouse Feelings

These feelings are real (I do not pretend to cry in front of a tearful film: if I cry,
I really cry) but disinterested, because I am a spectator and not a part involved.
It’s a good thing if an encyclopedia makes us dream, but if it doesn’t it is not
so bad. Documents rarely move us – unless they are injunctions or evictions.
Instead, artworks necessarily arouse disinterested feelings (to the point that
this does not happen only in a critique of the work, or due to the insensitivity
of the observer). What is expected from works of art are feelings and emotions,
that is, the same things that documents arouse in us, except that artworks pro-
voke them in a generalizable and disinterested form, while documents (a fine,
a winning lottery ticket) do it in an individual and interested form.

2.6 Article 6. Artworks Are Things Pretending to Be People

By this I mean that artworks, unlike people, cannot reciprocate our feelings.
The judgments that are formulated on artworks are, in a way, very similar to
the judgments that are formulated on people, and vice versa. Saying that some-
one is neither fish nor fowl is a (negative) judgment akin to saying that a work
of art leaves us indifferent. Instead, saying that a screwdriver or a telephone,
considered under their instrumental aspect, leave us indifferent is not a criti-
cism, but rather a bizarre expression. This last point, thanks to the techno-
logical evolution of the documedia age, turns out to be of particular interest in
relation to solving the mystery of the commodity.

3 Fountain: The Break

In 1917 Duchamp exhibited a urinal and declared that it was a work of art, en-
titled Fountain and signed R. Mutt. The point was not to seek beauty, or rather
to avoid “retinal art” or visual pleasure just like Marinetti shunned the moon-
light. The artist has better things to do than “pursue beauty in all its forms”;
this is nonsense that we can leave to the Baron de Charlus or to the furnish-
ings of Villa La Capponcina. The point, explains Duchamp, is “to create a new
24 Ferraris

thought for that object”, i.e. for the urinal. But what thought, exactly? Indeed,
rather than elaborating a new concept, which hasn’t yet been done (and since
it’s been one hundred and two years I’m afraid it never will be), it is a matter of
drafting a new contract with the user, who has to be very patient, just like the
reader has to be patient with me now.
The patience is primarily needed due to the charge of negativity that lies
at the center of this operation, which presupposes all of the previous art and
yet denies it. It is not the concept that is new – in fact, it is a continuation of
romanticism, of the conception of the work of art as a sensible appearance
of the idea. What changes is precisely the contract with the user (who, inci-
dentally, and with a change full of consequences, can no longer, by definition,
be a commissioner: if there is one thing that cannot be commissioned, it’s a
readymade). The contract manifests itself primarily as negativity, that is, as the
exclusion of a traditional identifying character of the artwork, namely beauty
as a specific feature of the fine arts as opposed to the useful arts. By doing
without beauty, i.e. the “retinal” character of the artwork, Duchamp thought he
got rid of sensibility to make room for ideas, but actually he simply eliminat-
ed the most striking (and ultimately circular: what defines beauty?) element
of the artwork, while preserving other, much more substantial traits of the
aesthetic contract: title and signature.

3.1 Article 1. Anything Can Be a Work of Art

If you put a urinal in a gallery, you say it’s a work of art and they believe you,
then anything can be a work of art.

3.1.1 Whateverism
The contract sounds like something generic, but that’s not quite the case, since
the objects of transfiguration are not generic things. Duchamp’s readymades
are artifacts or parts of artifacts: urinals, bottle-racks, bicycle wheels. In fact, we
insist on their character of readymades, of manufactured items. Their charac-
ter of commodity, however, stands out when it is used to show that the artist’s
craft is not necessary to give the object its artistic character. What’s surprising,
in fact, is to discover that there is no mention of beauty in the contract identi-
fying the work of art. All that is required is the recording of an act.
Duchamp voiced a widespread feeling after the explosion of the avant-
gardes, that is, the sense that anything can be a work of art (this is what I would
suggest to call “aesthetic conventionality”); that the true purpose of art is not
to please the taste of the users, but to demonstrate this theorem; and that the
philosophies of art must endorse it with what I call “whateverist theory”, so
From Fountain to Moleskine 25

it is not a question of explaining what we normally mean as art, but rather

the fact that under certain conditions even a urinal can be a work of art. I do
not know if this attitude was trying to make the fortune of critics, promoted
to all-powerful judges, or of bathroom fixtures manufacturers, who saw their
Lebensraum spread, but the fact is that exactly ninety years from Duchamp’s
provocation, common sense and experts agree at least on one point: that is,
that anything whatsoever can be a work of art.

3.1.2 Problems with Whateverism

Like all widely accepted theses, this one also arouses some suspicion. First
of all, it seems obvious that it does not refer to an aesthetic judgment, such
as “anything can be beautiful”, because – as shown by whateverists, who pro-
grammatically discard the judgment of taste – it would be like saying that “any
person can be beautiful” by a simple fiat of the critic, and not at the cost of
strenuous diets, heavy makeovers, high costs and sometimes mortal risks that,
as if that were not enough, often lead to nothing, so the victim remains ugly, as
well as silly. But let’s say that the phrase means: under certain conditions, and
regardless of any aesthetic consideration, anything can become a work of art,
that is, be counted among artistic objects, provided that anyone has the right
to declare their indifference or even repugnance at it. In these terms, it appears
as a fairly liberal and reasonable formulation. Now, is it really like that? And if
not, what is the difference between works of art and ordinary things?
This is a crucial question (for example, it has important financial implica-
tions) that seems to have taken the place of the Platonic question on the dif-
ference between things and artworks. Nobody – that I know, at least – believes
that a urinal imitates an idea: nobody thinks that Duchamp’s urinal is imitat-
ing an imitation, as perhaps Plato would suggest, establishing a hierarchy de-
scending from the idea of urinal conceived by the demiurge for the wellbeing
of people, to the urinal made by the craftsman imitating that idea, to the imi-
tation of the imitation, the artistic urinal that Duchamp exhibits in a gallery
without even bothering to paint it. We all agree: the Platonic hierarchy does
not hold; but, with or without Plato, why is Duchamp’s urinal an artwork, while
before being exposed it was simply a thing? This question suggests that the
philosophy of art, after so many centuries, has freed itself of the problem of
mimesis to deal with an even more embarrassing matter, that of readymade: it
is no longer a question of knowing whether the work is a copy of a copy, but
rather of determining why any object can, by a stroke of magic, become a work
of art. Or, at least, so we wish – if it were so the prices of artworks would be
laughable and we would be surrounded by masterpieces.
26 Ferraris

3.2 Article 2. Fine Arts Are No Longer Fine

In the eighteenth century people began to isolate, within the arts or tech-
niques, a subset identified by beauty and unified by imitation – this was the
claim made by Charles Batteux in 1746, which would shortcircuit the art system
a century later, with the arrival of photography. Once we have no longer need
for imitation, now entrusted to photographers, what is the point of beauty?
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: in 1839 the daguerreotype was invented and in 1853
Johann Rosenkranz published the Aesthetics of Ugliness. This was not neces-
sarily a bad thing, and it came with a certain sense of liberation. Are you tired
of showing an aesthetic devotion that you simply don’t feel before the Mona
Lisa? Don’t worry, draw a moustache on her and you shall be saved by the in-
tervention of Great Conceptual Art. Are you fed up with works that struggle to
be beautiful and are just vulgar or ordinary? Again, don’t worry: take a urinal,
or a bottle rack (curious tool, by the way) or a bicycle wheel, exhibit it in a
pertinent environment (a gallery or a museum), give it a title and sign it: you’ll
have realised the marvellous conceptual transubstantiation thanks to which a
common object becomes a work of art. In all this, applying the dogma of aes-
thetic indifference is crucial – God forbid some incompetent may think that
the miracle depends on the action of aesthetic properties instead of the con-
ceptual invention.

3.2.1 MOBA
In 1993, in Boston, they opened the MOBA: a Museum of Bad Art. This unusual
institution organises exhibitions and conferences developing an idea that is
simple but efficacious: take some bad paintings and call them by their real
name. This doesn’t always work: some pieces are not that bad after all, and
overall one gets the impression that the percentage of bad art is not signifi-
cantly greater than that present in many museums of fine arts, both ancient
and modern. What matters, though, is that MOBA ironizes about what for a
century now has been the fundamental aesthetic creed of avant-gardes, which
I would call “dogma of aesthetic indifference”. That is, the thesis according to
which beauty is no longer the primary objective of what used to be called “fine
arts” to distinguish them from useful arts. This aesthetic (or more exactly an-
aesthetic) creed comes from afar and goes back at least to Romanticism, char-
acterised by Hegel (who didn’t really like the Romantics) as a prevalence of
content over from, as a prearranged and strongly wanted disharmony.
Nonetheless, like in any religion, the dogma of aesthetic indifference has
many more followers in theory than in practice. When writing an essay on aes-
thetics, one is always ready to affirm that what one is dealing with is a con-
ceptual experience in which beauty is a fossil out of place. One is not as ready,
From Fountain to Moleskine 27

though, to affirm the same when buying a table or an armchair, a carpet or a

dress: then the requirement of aesthetic pleasantness stays unchanged. It is
not hard to recognise a contradiction here (or, to stick to religious jargon, a
double truth), by which our age carefully cultivates the myth of beauty and
yet easily accepts that what used to be called “fine arts” no longer have beauty
as their primary objective. Thus we have, on the one hand, the most beautiful
women and men in history, the most refined objects, the highest-quality food,
and incomparably better wines than all the wines humankind has ever drunk.
On the other, we have works of art that are ugly, on purpose so, or shabby, or
meaningless, or at least an art that thinks it can be ugly because it sees itself as
intelligent. And since looks (and taste) still matter, the consolation for visitors
is offered by galleries themselves, which are indeed beautiful (we shall come
back to this later, as it’s a fundamental point). Or perhaps the gratification lies
in the free white wine and cheese you are offered at inaugurations (unlike the
cinema, where you have to pay).
Now, there are people convinced that between what you see in a gallery and
what you put into your own house there is a huge gap. I (and I doubt I am the
only one) believe it is not so, also because many works of art are indeed des-
tined to enter people’s houses, just like many other handiworks..

3.2.2 Vittoriano, Vittoriale, Slaughterhouse

Despite appearances, the MOBA belongs to an ancient tradition, as its prede-
cessors can already be found in the situation described by Carlo Dossi when
commenting on the sketches for the Vittoriano in I mattoidi: al primo concorso
pel monumento in Roma a Vittorio Emanuele II (literally, The nutcases: the first
competition for the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome): “Èccomi a voi,
pòveri bozzetti fuggiti od avviati al manicomio, dinanzi ai quali chi prende la
vita sul tràgico passa facendo atti di sdegno e chi la prende, come si deve, a
gioco, si abbandona a momenti di clamorosa ilarità”.27 This was in 1884, that
is, in an age of bad taste and eclecticism possibly produced by the vast pho-
tographic material available (it is here, rather than in the loss of aura, that we
should measure the impact of technical reproducibility on art). Beauty was still
being searched for, but it wasn’t found, and the outcome was the very white,
marble writing machine that we can still see in Piazza Venezia in Rome – which
is not so bad, after all, if we compare it with other rejected sketches that Dossi
laughed about.

27 “Here I am, you poor sketches escaped from – or marching towards – the madhouse,
which arouse disdain in those who take life tragically, while causing moments of clamor-
ous hilarity in those who take it as a game (as they should)”.
28 Ferraris

Also, it is not so bad when compared with many works of art that fill gal-
leries and museums, and that appeal to Great Conceptual Art: the art that has
cultivated the dogmas of aesthetic indifference and auratic omnipotence. If
the works of the “nutcases” were often ugly but not on purpose, those of the
Great Conceptual Art are just as ugly, but purposely so. One would be tempted
to see this as an aggravating factor but instead, thanks to a somewhat miracu-
lous process (as it has to do with transfiguration), it is not so. While laughing at
the Vittoriano, scorning its ugliness and pitying its author are all accepted at-
titudes, if one risked doing the same with Great Conceptual Art one would be
in trouble, accused of nostalgia, incompetence, bad taste and aesthetic insen-
sibility (and it’s bizarre, given that this art does not aspire to beauty). Beauty is
no longer art’s business, and if you don’t get it then you’re an ignoramus.
If you think about it, this doctrine is bizarre, because it is like saying that
health is not medicine’s priority. Given that Great Conceptual Art came not
long after the Vittoriano, someone could malevolently think that the dogma of
aesthetic indifference is a later version of the fable of the fox and the grapes.
Yet the intimidated audience accepts and endures. They go to exhibitions,
applaud and buy if they can, proving to be much less self-confident than the
nineteenth century bourgeoisie, which would perhaps scorn Impressionism,
but at least, in so doing, showed that it had its own taste. Great Conceptual Art
users, instead, can at most say to themselves: “I could have made this”. But they
are wrong: the endeavour is far beyond their reach – it is very, and romanti-
cally, monumental.28
In the age when nutcases were competing for the Vittoriano, Nietzsche
wrote Beyond Good and Evil proposing a transvaluation of all values which
would be translated, among other things, into that foolish readymade that is
the Puglia cruiser planted in the middle of the park at D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale.
Nietzsche’s project was undoubtedly ambitious, but is was indeed realised in
art. When the last unprepared visitors – those ready to label all kinds of works
as ugly – were gone, a spell was cast so that their very children or grandchil-
dren now exclaim “Beautiful! Beautiful!” in front of works that have only one
declared feature, namely that of not aspiring to beauty.
The Zarathustra of this transvaluation was obviously Duchamp, thirty years
after the nutcases of the Vittoriano and only ten year before the Vittoriale read-
ymade. But Duchamp’s genius did not consist, as is sometimes believed, of his
breaking with the past. On the contrary, it consisted of his art’s ultimate con-
tinuity with tradition. His urinal, like the Mona Lisa with a moustache, draws

28 On the link between Great Conceptual Art and Romanticism see also B. Groys, History
Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (2010), Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
From Fountain to Moleskine 29

together the threads of the aesthetic frustrations accumulated by generations

of eclecticism and art pompier, together with a forced and semi-religious cult of
Great Non Conceptual Art. Therefore, deliberately avoiding beauty is the
first difference between Great Conceptual Art (represented consciously in
Duchamp’s urinal and unconsciously in the Puglia cruiser at the Vittoriale)
and the Vittoriano. There is a second difference. Dossi could easily laugh at the
Vittoriano, whereas with Duchamp’s urinal one needs to be very serious and
thoughtful, full of admiration and concentration. Otherwise one risks ending
up like Franti, who in Cuore is defined a “villain” for smiling when the teacher
narrates the funerals of king Umberto. Like in every miracle, it is necessary to
have a good deal of faith on the part of the observers. You have to believe it. But
once you do, then any transvaluation is possible.
It’d like to demonstrate this with an anecdote. A few years ago an important
foundation of Great Conceptual Art asked me to organise a cycle of confer-
ences in conjunction with the exhibition of an artist who proposed, I was told,
a profound reflection on violence. When I requested to know what the work
was about they explained to me that the artist had gone to a slaughterhouse in
Mexico and had killed a dozen horses with a hammer. The reflection on vio-
lence consisted of the recordings of the massacre. I pointed out that I couldn’t
see the meditative side, given that (if words have any meaning at all) it was not
a reflection but an action, a cruel and extremely violent one, a kind of snuff
movie against animals. I was then told that those animals were going to be
slaughtered anyway. So if the artist had gone to the showers in Auschwitz ham-
mering to death the wretched people who entered (and who were going to
die anyway) maybe some critics or curators would have said that the that was
also a profound reflection on violence. The entire conversation took place, of
course (we shall get back to this point, which might seem merely environmen-
tal but is actually crucial), in a white room, minimal and very elegant like an
Apple Store, and the people talking to me were all educated, well-mannered
and kind men and (mostly) women. I was the ill-mannered one, unwilling to
understand. On my way back home, I wondered if the transvaluation of all
values wasn’t moving from aesthetics to ethics, because perhaps aesthetic at-
rophy, the habit of swallowing anything, has started to create a form of moral
atrophy.

3.2.3 Work of Aura

The real desecration, though, lies not so much in the idea that anything can
be a work of art, including the slaughter of an animal, but rather in saying that
the ordinary object we call work of art – contrary to other things, as we will
see when talking about design – can afford to be ugly. It doesn’t have to aspire
30 Ferraris

to beauty, to the status of what Duchamp called “retinal art” – which, besides,
does not apply to other things of supposed aesthetic value, such as design ob-
jects. Therefore, Duchamp’s real stroke of genius, much more than the ready-
made, was the practical elaboration of the thesis of aesthetic indifference. This
thesis proves to be valuable and salvific in an age of aesthetic confusion, in
which the eclecticism of many traditions generates the situation of suburban
villas described by Gadda in Acquainted with Grief: they “had something of the
pagoda and something of the spinning mill, and they were also a compromise
between the Alhambra and the Kremlin”. In this grab-bag of styles, classes,
tastes and cultures, no one could be sure of one’s own taste, and everyone had
reasonable grounds to think one was wrong: the estimators of Impressionism
felt insecure because now that movement had been overcome by Cubism, the
lovers of Art Pompier felt the same because they were considered “poor in
spirit” by the enthusiasts of Impressionism and Cubism, and Andrea Sperelli
felt under-confident because of the suspicion that the furnishings of the Villa
La Capponcina were rubbish. Then, all of a sudden, there was Duchamp’s
break with the past: what matters is not Beauty, but the Concept. Once this is
clear, with a radical Copernican revolution, one can stop worrying.
One important clarification needs to be made, though. I said that the
dogma of aesthetic indifference comes from afar and goes back at least to
Romanticism, which was characterised by Hegel as a prearranged and strongly
wanted disharmony.29 It is not by chance that, as we have seen, in 1853 the
Hegelian Rosenkranz wrote Aesthetics of Ugliness,30 grasping the spirit of
the age: beauty was not needed, the aura was enough, although this took place
in the epoch of the daguerreotype – that is, of the technical reproducibility
that, according to Benjamin,31 causes the end of artistic aura. At least from this
point of view, Romanticism is far from Classicism. But is it really true? With a
choice charged with consequences, Hegel dates back the birth of Romanticism
and makes it coincide with Christian art. Christ on the cross is not nice to
look at,32 what matters is the spiritual significance of the scene: here, in this
extreme conceptualism, we have the most powerful antecedent of Duchamp.
The bottle rack or the bicycle wheel are not beautiful either, and there is some-
thing hyper-religious in the degradation of art represented by the urinal. All
romantic art develops this hyper-spiritual vocation – and the same goes for

29 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art (1835), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
30 J. K. F. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen (1853), Königsberg: Bornträger.
31 W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, cit.
32 M. Bacci, The Many Faces of Christ. Portraying the Holy in the East and West, 300 to 1300
(2014), London: Reaktion Books.
From Fountain to Moleskine 31

its heirs, the avant-gardes, which not coincidentally mainly took place in the
Christian world (to my knowledge there are no Islamic, Jewish, Confucian,
Taoist, or Hindu avant-gardes). The claim made by contemporary visual art
that beauty is not its main concern is a statement of hyper-conceptuality.
Well, but if the avant-garde refers to romanticism, and romanticism to
Christianity, then the classic and the modern, which seemed to be separated
for millennia, are actually very close. As often happens, the history of the spirit
does not throw anything away, and keeps both aesthetic religion and the
romanticism of the cross.
In “Pourquoi l’art gréco-romain a-t-il disparu?”, one of the most remark-
able chapters of L’empire gréco-romain,33 Paul Veyne describes an important
moment in late antique art. The choice to abandon the canon of beauty did
not happen, in classical art, due to an abrupt interruption by which artistic
mastery turned into ineptitude and inexpressiveness. Such a claim is as puer-
ile as the idea that, roughly in 476 after Christ, we went straight from Roman
legionaries to the knights of the round table. In fact, on the margins of the
classical world, there was a moment in which it was decided to let go of beauty,
with a complex evolution that finds a perfect correspondence in the artistic
events of the past two centuries. First of all, people abandoned the canon of
ideal beauty, and made space for individuality. That philosopher or that mag-
istrate are undoubtedly uglier and more disproportionate than some mythi-
cal figure, but it’s them, really them. Then, something really conceptual came
forward: Plotinus’ intelligible beauty, or expressiveness at all costs, sometimes
even parody. In all these cases, the balance between form and content is lost,
not through incapacity, but through a deliberate decision: we are not inter-
ested in expressing beauty, we want to express something else. For example,
the hierarchy, as in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare; or concordance, as in the
tetrarchs of Venice; or power, as in the Colossus of Barletta. And let’s not for-
get that these deformations already contained elements that, again, modern
arrogance tends to attribute to romanticism and the avant-gardes: the irony,
the ridicule, the unfinished.
Therefore, not only does modernity manifest the symptoms and transfor-
mations of an aesthetic religion that is the classical one in all respects, but, for
its part, the classical world proves to be anything but indifferent to the seduc-
tions of the ugly, of the deformed, of the badly made. And above all it is very
capable of recognizing the centrality of the concept in the work of art. One
might object that this is true for the terminal stage of classicism, for the ap-
parently traumatic moment, which in fact lasted for centuries, in which the

33 P. Veyne, L’empire gréco-romain (2005), Paris: Le Seuil.

32 Ferraris

Greco-Roman civilization faced its end. But is not so. Indeed, the primacy
of the concept, the excess of content with respect to the form, does not only
concern the end of classicism, but also its close or remote antecedents, which
are not the manifestation of a form that prevails over the content, but, on the
contrary, present a predominance of the content over the form, that is, a total
conceptuality.
Let’s take the pyramid. What can be more conceptual than a pyramid? Hegel
(without realizing that, in so doing, he was attributing to Egyptian art the
characteristics of romanticism) rightly defined it “the symbol of the sign”: on
the outside, a huge and insignificant solid; on the inside, an accumulation of
scriptures and secrets and, at the center, the embalmed body of the pharaoh.
Or think of Stonehenge. What is conveyed is not some aesthetic concept, but
much more: an astronomical conception and a vision of the world. Or consider
the Lascaux caves, which from this point of view appear even more sublime,
because the drawings seem to manifest a figurative will, but their intent was
probably different, and had to do with magic (or at least with what we very
improperly call thus) and hunting. One might object that none of these ex-
amples can be part of what we commonly call “art” – but this shows precisely
how high their conceptuality is. The pyramids, Stonehenge, and cave paint-
ings are pure concepts. Their authors would have been ashamed if someone
had thought of comparing them to those futile creations that we call “works
of art”.34 In short, there are few areas in which modern arrogance is so badly
placed as that of art. No one claims to have made works more beautiful than
those forged by the ingenuity of the ancients: everyone places themselves on
the horizon of the sentimental, and then of the conceptual. But all claim that it
was the moderns who introduced something radically new into art, something
of which nobody had the slightest hint before: disenchantment, seriality and
conceptuality. Well, as we have just seen, this is false. The modern work of art is
the object of a religious cult that is not diminished by seriality; and the ancient
or very ancient work of art was no less serial and conceptual than those that
populate modern art galleries.

3.3 Article 3. The Quality of the Artwork Is Guaranteed by the Market

Since it is too easy for the artist to overestimate their work, since the user
does not have the support of their own taste, and since beauty does not fall

34 On the modern origin of the notion of art cf. S. Settis, “Rinascimento e decadenza: una
simmetria necessaria”, in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, LVI
(2014), Heft 2, pp. 139–151. On the crisis of the notion of art in the contemporary age, cf.
G. Agamben, Archeologia dell’opera (2013), Mendrisio: Mendrisio Academy Press.
From Fountain to Moleskine 33

within the elements involved in the evaluation of an artwork, a third element is

established, despite heavy conflicts of interest: the market or, in other words,
the Artworld.35 The traditional contract posited that the work of art was a
beautiful object in itself, which pleases outside of any context. Breaking this
contract has the merit of revealing the authentic nature of art: the work of art
is subject to the same principle that, according to some philosophers,36 applies
to social objects in general: X (an ordinary object) counts as Y (a work of art) in
C (in the context of Artworld). That is, the artwork is not identified by intrinsic
qualities, but by its insertion into a context.

3.3.1 The Artworld Thesis

The Artworld thesis has more than one element of truth to it. There is no doubt
that the artwork’s nature derives from the context. An object with religious,
ritual or instrumental purposes can become a work of art in a given context
(the use of Renaissance armor in a museum is aesthetic and leaves out its tech-
nical functionality). It is also undoubted that the way in which the artwork
presents itself in the Artworld is akin to the way in which a commodity is part
of the market: it has an identity, a price, and has an exchange value that tran-
scends its use value. In fact, works of art are first and foremost commodities:
they are for sale, and often reproduce goods. Since the industrial revolution,
the artwork has found its identity, as it should be, in its price, that is, in its com-
modity nature. Evolving together with the society and the industry, the work of
art has acquired a prophetic nature with respect to the nature of commodities,
and this is all the more evident today, when both the nature of goods and that
of labour, as I will try to demonstrate, are manifested by art. The latter, indeed,
is what one must look at, not to seek the opposite of the world of capital and
labor, but rather to find its becoming and its future.

3.3.2 Problems with the Artworld Thesis

However, there are just as many problematic elements in the Artworld thesis.
The first is that, as we are seeing, it is not true that anything can be a work
of art. Saying that anything can be a work of art is like saying that anything
can be money or, more seriously, that any person can be an artist. Ash, for ex-
ample, could hardly be used as currency (unless it was stored in bags). And

35 On the notion of “Artworld”, see H. S. Becker, Artworlds (1982), Berkeley: University of
California Press. The first theoretician of the Artworld has been the American philoso-
pher Arthur C. Danto, in his article “The Artworld”, in The Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964),
pp. 571–584.
36 J. R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), New York: Free Press.
34 Ferraris

although the quality of the artist is not as exclusive as the theories of genius
supposed, the fact remains that some people are more artistic than others,
but above all that, unless we assume an omnipotent collective intentionality,
or more correctly a total conformism, claiming that Hitler was an artist is no
less daring than claiming that Elena Ceauşescu was a scientist. Both things
have been and can be claimed in a way (Hitler painted, and Elena Ceauşescu,
despite never going to school, was president of Romania’s leading chemical
research institute). Nevertheless, saying that Hitler was an artist and Elena
Ceauşescu a scientist would simply be nonsense.
The second is that the extension of the Artworld thesis to social reality in
general is misleading. The constitutive law “X counts as Y in C” applies only to
the Artworld: C is the artworld, and not the social world in general, because
in the social world in general there are conflicts and contradictions that are
not present in the world of art. Consider these examples: 1. X-urinal counts as
Y-Fountain in C-gallery; 2. X-piece of green paper (or piece of metal, or sack
of salt, or byte) counts as Y-dollar in C-United States; 3. X-use value counts as
Y-exchange value in C-market. It is certainly much easier to accept a urinal as a
work of art than to accept a fake note or a damaged commodity. In this sense,
the work of art is not a prototype of social objects, but rather (in agreement,
this time, with the general rule “Object = Recorded Act”) it is a subspecies. This
circumstance is all the more important because it is what allows for the fusion
between art and social reality as a whole, which I will examine in the fourth
chapter.
While the rule “X counts as Y in C” was inapplicable to social reality as a
whole, unless one wanted to postulate an omnipotent collective intention-
ality, the rule “Object = Recorded Act” is already the ordinary rule of social
reality, which very naturally also applies to the work of art as a social object.
This rule also applies to readymades, while, as we have seen, the latter cannot
be generalized. The readymade is, indeed, something made, it is an artifact, the
result of an industrial process (for what pertains to the model: as we will see,
Warhol ‘s concrete specimen is instead the result of an artisanal process, even
if not by Warhol’s own hands). The contract is now: Object (and, as a subspe-
cies, Artwork) = Recorded Act and Commodity = Recorded Object. Here the
commodity results from a double recording and registration – indeed, it is a
registered trademark.

3.4 Article 4. There Is No Money Back Guarantee

Quite the opposite: if you’re not happy with your purchase, you shall be pun-
ished. It means you cannot play along. This part of the contract often goes
unnoticed, but it is no less characteristic than whateverism (the thesis that
From Fountain to Moleskine 35

anything can be art) and anaesthetism (the thesis that art does not need to
be beautiful). Again, Carlo Dossi could easily laugh about the crazy project
for the Vittoriano, but in front of the urinal (in fact, the urinatory, the idol of
an absorbed prayer) today we must be very serious and thoughtful like good
children on a school trip. You cannot ask for your money back any more than
a failed miracle can induce a believer to embrace atheism. The believer will
reformulate their question and their faith, elaborating alternative theories,
which in the case of art can be declined in terms of a dialectic between elites
and people.

3.4.1 Elites
The elite focuses on auratization by creating a cult that is as exclusive as it is
irrational, and is based on the credo quia absurdum. The apparent desecration
capitalizes, in fact, on the sacred value of art, and herein lies the core of in-
timidation. Like Mona Lisa’s moustache derives its prestige from transgression
and lese majesty, so the readymade presupposes a consecration that is con-
substantial with the desecration. Duchamp, in showing his objects, exploited
precisely the canonical value of art, an entire patrimony of respectability and
of auraticity that brought balance to an otherwise disadvantageous deal: bow
to this ugliness (remember that for Hegel romanticism found its fundamental
paradigm in the scandal of Christ on the cross), because with this genuflection
you honor the unknown god of art. On the pedestal, the thing becomes a work
of art, and the devoted user will contemplate urinals and bottle-racks with the
same tense and aesthetically focused attitude that is dedicated to romantic
art. Indeed, in art galleries we behave as if in church, or in Bayreuth: we often
keep quiet, or whisper, and it seems impious to enjoy the artworks as they did
in the eighteenth century, when the lights were left on and people ate at the
theater. Even the chardonnay and the cheddar offered at galleries, in the end,
have more the meaning of a Eucharist than that of a party snack – the latter
would reduce works of art to ornaments and accompaniments.
Surprisingly, therefore, while the artist desecrates (at least apparently), the
user consecrates, and feels invested with a decisive task: to bestow the value
of art, with their faith, on an ordinary object, just like a fallen meteorite in
the desert can be transformed by the faithful into the symbol of the only
God. The common element to the two experiences, the ritual in the gallery and
the one in the desert, is mystery: it is not very clear what is expected from the
work of art, but it is a kind of redemption. In short, if the technical reproduc-
ibility of the work of art produced a loss of the aura deriving from uniqueness,
this aura was promptly reconstructed by the faith of the users. The outward
manifestation of devotion is often inadequate, and therefore saying “beautiful,
36 Ferraris

beautiful” is more an invocation than an appreciation. In other words, this is

a strategy of the sublime, which was largely rehabilitated in the critical dis-
course on the avant-gardes. The beautiful shines by absence where there is
nothing beautiful, and indeed what is sought is rather the common and the
ugly. But in this lack, in this inadequacy between concept and object (this is
essentially the sublime as Kant theorized it in the Critique of Judgment) one
gets the impression of going far beyond the beautiful. What matters are the
intentions and thoughts, not the sensible appearance, as suggested with ter-
rifying sexism again by Kant, who said that a woman can be beautiful, but only
man is sublime.
This is the element that guarantees the extreme profitability of the contract,
but which also marks its ephemeral nature. You can fool some people for a long
time, but not many people for a long time. The avant-garde is facing a crisis,
especially in the arts where it is a question of selling many specimens – typical-
ly, literary avant-gardism does not last long, and musical avant-gardism soon
faces the competition of pop music, eventually becoming normalized.

3.4.2 People
As opposed to the elites, the people develop alternative cults, which are now
recognizable and universalizable (or at least transferable) thanks to the cul-
tural industry as manufacture of reproducibility. In fact, like all forms that are
too ascetic, intimidation allows for indulgence, that is, for spaces where plea-
sure is returned, like a feast given with the pretext of honoring a given saint.
It is no coincidence that the era of Great Conceptual Art, like that of the ro-
mantic spirit, is the only one in the history of taste that has devised compen-
satory sub-categories: Kitsch, Camp, Pop etc. (and one of these, i.e. Pop, was
then assumed within Great Conceptual Art as a stratagem, to which I will go
back in a moment). These come to the rescue when taste is no longer sure of
itself, or when it cannot dare confess its predilections. If one wants to listen to
Lady Gaga and likes her better than Stravinsky, if one likes the Campbell’s soup
boxes and knows nothing about Picasso, and above all if one is bored to death
by looking at Duchamp’s urinal for the umpteenth time, there is a way out: it
suffices to state that one likes Kitsch, Camp and Pop, and one will make a great
impression.
This suggests that the element common to the Camp-Kitsch-Pop compen-
satory triad is the fear of being judged, and even more of judging – indeed,
an unsure taste. For a full “customs clearance” (to use a Camp, Kitsch or Pop
expression, I’m not sure which) of the phenomenon, we must wait for its out-
come and natural development: postmodernism. Consider, for example, a sig-
nificant conversation between Charles Jenks and Susan Sontag: Jenks’ idea is
From Fountain to Moleskine 37

that people ruin their lives for the sake of principles, and that it’s better to be
nihilists, that is, not to worry about those who judge us Camp, Kitsch or Pop.
Hence the genealogy. We start with Camp, first in England and then worldwide,
we continue with Kitsch and Pop, and we finally reach the peak with postmod-
ernism and weak thought. The latter gives to the lovers of Camp, Kitsch and
Pop – that is, to the whole of humanity – a degree of good conscience, a kind
of absolution or plenary indulgence: “don’t worry, you do not have bad taste.”
Or rather: even bad taste has its space and social dignity: it even has dedicated
essays, manuals, conferences and conventions.
The Romantics sought a synthesis between philosophy and art; they pur-
sued a new mythology. This dream, however, has yielded two fruits: ascetic art,
which took its first steps in later Beethoven’s style, and Kitsch, which originally
designated the taste of the new bourgeoisie of Munich, who could not stand
Beethoven’s quartet but adored Loden capes. With time and with industry,
capitalism and imperialism, the phenomenon became universal, by passing
through stronger cultural circuits and important industrial circuits. The soli-
tary Kitsch of Hölderlin saying that man dwells poetically was thus replaced
by Brian Jones in a pinstripe suit in Swinging London, Gina Lollobrigida, Victor
Mature, Flash Gordon and the monumental lapels of Gianni Agnelli’s double-
breasted suit. This “anything goes” situation would have pleased Nietzsche:
“I am all the names in history”, as he wrote to Burckhardt. Or, as Arbasino wrote
in his novel Super Eliogabalo, “Nietzsche, Adorno, Lacan, Totò”. All camp, no
doubt. And, if that’s how things are, the most camp of all is Martin Heidegger, in
a Tyrolean jacket and with a nightcap on his head (all aspects well captured
in Thomas Bernhard’s camp book Old Masters), intent on proclaiming that the
work of art is nothing more than the truth of being setting itself to work, illus-
trating his thesis with the temple of Paestum, the shoes painted by Van Gogh
and a poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

3.4.3 Intimidation and Indulgence

Therefore, intimidation is never total, but always comes with a degree of in-
dulgence and soothing. After all, how could one endure all this otherwise?
Sometimes, walking around galleries and exhibitions, one wonders how afraid
people must be to pay to visit them and exhibit such a respectful and timid
attitude – in short, one wonders where the threat comes from. One also won-
ders how it is humanly possible to find everything beautiful, as this certainly
does not happen at restaurants or shops: in life we do reject, or simply not like,
things. In art, on the other hand, everything is beautiful, and this – for a further
paradox – happens precisely now that Great Conceptual Art has imposed the
canon of aesthetic indifference. Now, it is difficult not to note one elementary
38 Ferraris

thing: in this transfiguration, as is often the case in transfigurations, there is not

only a great deal of circumvention but also a significant amount of social in-
timidation, which is based on the solid bourgeois element that has been called
“distinction” from Nietzsche37 to Bourdieu.38 It is not distinguished to fail to
appreciate the slaughter of horses. And it is not distinguished to show some
hesitation in front of a work that consists (I happened to see it) of a chainsaw
in a dinghy, which I think was supposed to mean the transience of all human
things, a bit like a Stilleben created by Leroy Merlin. The chainsaw in the din-
ghy was the repetitive and almost paroxysmal version, almost a hundred years
later, of the readymade. Now, I know this observation is not very original, but
the readymade has all the aspects of an ingenious idea that, with time, iteration
and imitation, has eventually become an intellectual fraud motivated by eco-
nomic interests. At its heart there is a powerful intuition. When the Vittoriano’s
nutcases sought beauty and did not find it, commiting to covering every object
with an aesthetic patina, they made a radical gesture: to claim that it is useless
to look for beauty, because anything can be a work of art.
The first act, therefore, is desecration. The work of art has nothing special
about it, it can be anything whatsoever. However, it is not true that anything
can be a work of art, not even when it comes to readymades: for example, it
would be difficult to transform into a work of art a natural event like a hur-
ricane, or an ideal object like an equilateral triangle (at most, there would be
a concrete object, the drawing of an equilateral triangle, in a gallery: and that,
not the triangle itself, would be the artwork). Rather, what Duchamp suggest-
ed is something very reasonable and that I am personally willing to fully sub-
scribe to, namely that the work of art is first and foremost a thing, with certain
dimensions, characteristics, etc. Indeed, museums (and the princely galleries
that preceded them) have always welcomed all sorts of objects that were not
intended for aesthetic contemplation: weapons, buckles, tombs and, of course,
human bodies, as in Egyptian museums, which demonstrate that body art has
an ancient soul. This circumstance triggers a dialectic whose main representa-
tive is Warhol’s Brillo Box.

37 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Cambridge
(UK): CUP, 2012. Nietzsche, theorizing the pathos of distance, was the first victim.
38 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), Cambridge
(MA): Harvard University Press, 1987.
From Fountain to Moleskine 39

4 Brillo Box: The Reconciliation

How long could the break last? Not much, also because in the meantime the
world continued to overflow with beautiful cars and people, with very fancy
food and, thanks to large-scale distribution, with very attractive packaging for
the all kinds of goods. After retiring from art galleries, beauty reappeared in
supermarkets. Andy Warhol understood this very well, and in 1964 he exhib-
ited a box of Brillo steel pads (a Procter & Gamble product), identical to the
one found in stores except slightly larger and made of plywood. The continu-
ity with the urinal is only apparent. Brillo was not just found and exhibited,
but manufactured on purpose; there are no pads inside; its material and size
are different from the original’s. Above all, it is a beautiful object. The person
who had designed it and who, incidentally, was also an artist in his own right,
the abstract expressionist James Harvey, wanted it to be beautiful, otherwise
Procter & Gamble would not have paid him – just as the Pope would not have
paid Bernini if the colonnade had left him dissatisfied. Let’s go over the articles
of this new contract.

4.1 Article 1. Looks Matter

4.1.1 No Favoritism
Chefs who mess up the cooking and coaches who lose three games in a row
are fired; a movie or a novel can be judged to be bad; and unfortunately, even
people can be either ugly or beautiful – mirrors tell us so with particular cru-
elty. So why should we grant to a class of objects the peculiar immunity of
aesthetic indifference? Similarly to a traditional painter, and exactly like an
Apple designer, Warhol sought beauty, and found it on the surface. It was al-
ready there, in supermarkets or at the cinema, so he simply changed a detail,
for example by enlarging (that is, literally, magnifying) the soup or the pads, or
by dyeing the goddess. But Marilyn on a golden background is not Mona Lisa
with a mustache: she is deified, not ironized.

4.1.2 The Great Beauty

Just like Michelangelo’s Pietà (and unlike Duchamp’s urinal or bottle rack),
Brillo Box is made to be a work of art. Far from being an object found and exhib-
ited with a nihilistic gesture, it is literally (given its increased size) the magni-
fication of certain aspects of our life, the life of mass societies and advertising
(with soups, divas, and television). This work means: “look how beautiful your
world is, look how beautiful those boxes are”. Warhol invests his works with a
very strong aesthetic charge: he literally magnifies (that is, makes bigger and
40 Ferraris

more evident), Campbell’s soups, Brillo Boxes and, of course, Marilyn Monroe
and Liz Taylor for a simple and decisive reason – they are beautiful, which,
again, cannot be said of Duchamp’s urinal or bottle rack. At the 1964 exhibition
there were other Warhol works derived from commercial packaging: Kellogg’s
flakes, Del Monte peaches, Campbell’s tomato soup, and Heinz Ketchup. Now,
for a shared sentiment, the vast majority of visitors found them less beautiful
than Brillo Box and today the quotations of the respective works still reflect
that impression. How is it possible? Well, the answer is simple. Brillo Box was
objectively more beautiful than the box of tomato juice or that of peaches.

4.1.3 Holiness and Prostitution

However, like the urinal, Brillo unites the holiness of the work of art with the
prostitution of the commodity: it counts as a commodity,39 and the problem
with seriality arises from the fact that it is industrially produced and repro-
duced by hand. As a commodity, it is a sensibly supersensible object, that is, the
sensible appearance of the idea. Also, as an extra seductive element, Brillo Box
metaphorically recalls the readymade, as it reproduces a thing that is found in
the world of everyday objects. Therefore, it makes aesthetically pleasing what
was only ugly or insignificant in true readymades, that is, in Great Conceptual
Art. More than a transfiguration of the commonplace promoted to the status
of art, Brillo Box appears as a secularization of the readymade, which brings
the harsh and ugly provocations of Great Conceptual Art to the more welcom-
ing level of Pop. In other words, it is a process that has the same dynamics
and the same motivations as the relationship between high fashion and prêt à
porter: take an abstruse phenomenon, a pure intellectual game without any
aesthetic appeal and propose it in an infinitely more attractive and sensual
setting (sensual and attractive at least as the boxes on supermarket shelves).
There is very little – if anything – left of the original phenomenon, because
Warhol did not make real readymades any more than Lichtenstein created real
comics.

4.2 Article 2. Not Anything Can Be a Work of Art

Fountain suggested that anything can be a work of art. But Brillo reminds us
that the artwork is above all a thing, neither too big nor too small. It is one of
those things that are found in the supermarket, just like the non-transfigured

39 Today, “Brillo” are still the soap pads par excellence in the United States, albeit with a
slightly different packaging (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brillo). I do not think that
the longevity of the product is due to its artistic consecration, but it certainly owes some-
thing to its packaging, which is still affected by James Harvey’s influence.
From Fountain to Moleskine 41

cousins of Fountain can be found in bathroom fixtures shops. Brillo’s ordi-

nary thinghood suggests that it is not true that anything can be a work of art.
Indeed, the sphere of art is much more circumscribed than we might think. We
can verify it easily.

4.2.1 Ideal Objects

When we talk about “works of art”, we refer not to ideas, but to their sensible
appearance, to their expression; when we visit a gallery we do not see the re-
minders of the artists’ ideas, but, precisely, their artworks. In fact, let’s say that
Goya and Picasso designed two Pythagorean theorems: they would be two dif-
ferent objects just like La Maya desnuda and its remake by Picasso, or the in-
numerable depositions or crucifixions or flights into Egypt found throughout
the history of art, or the many myths of Oedipus from Sophocles to Joyce. So,
what matters, what counts as “work of art”, is not the theorem as such, but its
transcription. What counts as “work of art” is something that, in geometry, has
to do with the simple socialization of the ideal object: an inscription (that one
and not another) that, under certain conditions (for example, a geometry man-
ual exhibited at the Center Pompidou or at the MOMA), can be a work of art.

4.2.2 Size
Thus, ideal objects remain outside the catalog of works of art. Does this mean
that any physical object (such as to have a place in space and time) can be
one? As said, not necessarily. For example, a statue that were twenty kilome-
tres tall, or even just two thousand meters tall, could not be a “work of art”. The
criterion may appear extrinsic, yet it matters, indeed, and sets limits that prove
to be intrinsic to the essence of the work of art. The twenty-kilometre statue
could never be perceived entirely, with a single glance, nor could it ever really
be located as an object of contemplation. When Christo wraps the Chinese
wall, first of all he does not wrap it all, and secondly he actually photographs it
and puts it in catalogues: the artwork is the catalogue rather than the wrapped
wall, which exists only to amaze the bourgeois and to be photographed. In
short, works of art share certain characteristics with commonplace objects,
and in particular that of fitting into the human environment, in terms of
size and duration. Let’s verify this.

4.2.3 Space
As for space, a two-millimetre statue, which could only be seen with a micro-
scope, would in fact be a performance made with a microscope, and not a work
in itself; likewise, a copy of Don Quixote that were as big as a stock cube (and
which could only be read with a lens supplied with the micro-book) would not
42 Ferraris

be not a real book, but a curiosum. The moral is that essentialism is a highly
recommended strategy, provided that one focuses on the real essences; in par-
ticular one has to be willing to recognize the essential in what often appears
to be inessential. God hides in sizes: after all, we are used to considering the
issues of size as extrinsic with respect to art, but when an artwork cannot be
seen entirely with the naked eye and requires, say, a journey to a satellite, it
certainly goes beyond the sphere of artworks; conversely, saying of a city that is
“people-friendly”, to say that it is “on a human scale”, is a compliment.

4.2.4 Time
And now we come to time. At a given hour of the day, people want to go to
sleep, and I suppose that Aristotle was alluding to this, too, when he proposed
unity of time, place and action for tragedies. Now imagine a novel of a million
pages. At the age of fifty, who would have the courage to undertake its read-
ing? And who would begin to read it, even as a boy, while hoping (as is always
recommendable) to do also something else in life? And who would ever even
write it? Even the Bible, dictated by God, is a big book, but it does not have a
million pages. In short, works of art must fit human life: we cannot imagine a
symphony that lasts for a millennium. As Slow As Possible, John Cage’s com-
position that lasts 639 minutes (over ten and a half hours) is not quite part
of the repertoire of all concert halls, let alone Satie’s Vexations (24 hours of
piano). Time counts, and how. Warhol’s Empire (over eight hours of Empire
State Building shot on a fixed camera) overcame the patience of film buffs and
already Wagner’s Ring faced some problems in being executed (question: how
many of you have ever heard the whole Ring? I certainly haven’t, and yet I have
heard many shorter works a dozen times). These limitations, of course, are
valid for the experience of artworks. They cannot ask me to spend a thousand
years reading an epic Finnish poem, but the Kalevala can very well survive for
centuries. This, however, is another story.

4.2.5 The Falsification of Aesthetic Whateverism

Let’s continue. Disproving the thesis that “anything can be a work of art”, it
turns out that a theorem and a number will never be art, and the same goes
for disproportionate physical objects such as a twenty-kilometre or a two-
millimetre statue, or a book of a million pages. One could, however, object
that the twenty-kilometre-tall statue could delight a Martian, that the two-
millimetre one could please an ant and that a baobab might not despise the
idea of a novel that lasts for a very long time. However, it is clear that for a
Martian, for an ant and for a baobab, these would not be works of art, simply
because art is a social fact, which exists only for humans and because there
are humans. If this is the case, not even a concert of dog whistles could ever
From Fountain to Moleskine 43

become a work of art: since the work of art is a physical object, it can present
itself as such only to dogs, and not to human ears. However, since the work of
art is also a social object, that is, it exists as a work of art (and not as a mere
physical object) only because there are humans who consider it such, then
the concert of dog whistles, which cannot be heard by humans, is not a social
object, and the fact that it is a physical object for dogs does not entail that it is
a work of art. It would be different if there were a screen reproducing sound
intensities; in this case the canine symphony would be a visual work of art
(a kind of conceptual art), but not a musical work. No dog whistles concerts,
then. Let’s get over it.
So, summing up: the Pythagorean theorem, number 5, a twenty-kilometre or
two-millimetre statue, a novel of a million pages and a concert of dog whistles
can never be works of art. It seems to me that we managed to refuse the con-
ventionalist thesis without much difficulty. Even if only the six objects I have
listed could not become artworks, it would be enough to prove that it is not
true that anything can be a work of art. And note that when I say that it is
not true that anything can be a work of art, I also mean to say that a hypo-
thetical “anything”, a chameleonic and ever-changing thing, could never be a
work of art either. In fact, imagine an object that changes continuously. In the
morning it’s an insect, in the afternoon it looks like an admiral, in the evening
it’s a computer program and at night it’s Duchamp’s urinal. This is the first day.
Then, the next day it is a camel, a penny coin, a passport, a drop of rain in the
pinewood and Mona Lisa. The third day it is other things, and so on, forever.
This hypothetical object is the practical realization of the dream of infinite in-
terpretation: here there is work for everyone. Yet, such a thing, if it could exist,
could never become a work of art, because a work of art needs an identity, it
must be X and not Y. And the work of art, no matter how many interpretations
it can admit (which however are not infinite, contrary to what people some-
times think: try to interpret the Via Crucis as a Dolce & Gabbana catwalk), it
cannot be anything whatsoever.

4.3 Article 3. The Work of Art Is Mainly a Thing

Duchamp tried to prove that anything can be a work of art, but what he has
proven is rather (and fortunately) that the work of art is first and foremost a
thing. Many artists have followed Duchamp in the first perspective, i.e. on the
wrong track, in a pursuit of tricks and mirabilia that have become less and less
surprising and increasingly repetitive, based on the idea – worthy of the worst
bureaucrat – that with a certificate even a toothache can be a masterpiece. Few
have followed him (or rather, contradicted and perfected him) on the second
aspect, i.e. on the thesis that the artwork is first of all a thing – more exactly
and literally a commodity.
44 Ferraris

4.3.1 A World Full of Objects

In 2007, at the Venice Biennale, Sophie Calle presented Prenez Soin de Vous.
And with good reason people wondered: where is the work of art? In the pavil-
ion or in the book (which we would inappropriately call “catalogue”, as it is not
its simple reproduction, but the original)? And, more radically, where are the
works of art, in the national pavilions? Or in the international pavilion selling
catalogues, erasers, pen holders, fridge magnets but unfortunately no snow-
balls, because they are considered kitsch?
This is the lesson of the readymade, which finds its most resounding confir-
mation not in avant-garde galleries, but in much more traditional venues. After
all, the galerie of the seventeenth century, the aristocratic ancestors of mu-
seums, showed paintings alongside guns and armor, doing the same thing as
Duchamp. And under the profile of readymades, archaeological museums are
hyper-transgressive, because they exhibit tombstones, sarcophagi, amphorae,
buckles … Up to that variant of readymade we call body art. Indeed, long be-
fore the latter, the exposure of bodies as works of art was the norm in Egyptian
museums, not to mention Pompeii, where the visitor is exposed to the casts of
human beings caught in the act of dying.
If this consideration can perhaps appear surprising, it is because we do not
always sufficiently reflect on the meaning of “thing”, “instrument” and “work
of art”, but also “museum”, “catalogue”, “library”, and on the somewhat opaque
laws that regulate the distinctions between these entities. For example, books
are rarely accepted in museums, except when they become visual poetry or,
again (in line with Duchamp’s ontological intuition), deconstructed books,
pieces of pages and a cover like the Mariée mise à nu, which indeed succeeds
in reintroducing the book in museums. But in the vast majority of cases, in
museums, the book does not play the part of the ergon, of the work, but of the
parergon, of something that surrounds it, as the frame does with the paint-
ing. In fact, we find books in the museum’s bookshop, along with postcards,
bags, diaries, erasers and pencils – these are all parerga. However, in my opin-
ion, these things fully fall within the experience of the work, of the ergon, just
like the Parmesan shavings and the glasses of chardonnay offered at gallery
openings.

4.3.2 The Melancholy Muse of Furniture

In What is Called Thinking?, with a concrete protest against Great Conceptual
Art, Heidegger states that thinking is a manual activity, and adds that think-
ing is a bit like building a wardrobe. Heidegger aside, furniture has the same
muse as philosophy, marked by melancholy. Here is another way to look at
objects. The “Transfiguration of the Commonplace” finds a precise antecedent
From Fountain to Moleskine 45

in Dutch interior painting, and in particular in Vermeer, who indeed success-

fully engaged in a “transfiguration of the commonplace” (which becomes “ac-
ceptance of the commonplace” in Edouard Vuillard). In fact, that fact that
ordinary objects hide a potential work of art was understood by the Dutch
long before Pop Art, although this comparison reveals a deep affinity between
the inhabitants of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and those of New
Amsterdam in the twentieth century, an affinity consisting of a deep bourgeois
pride in owning goods.
This can be seen in Mario Praz’s Illustrated History of Interior Decoration:
the representation of a room of the Prinz-Max-Palais in Dresden dates back to
1776, and is one of the first testimonies of a genre that would be very popular in
the nineteenth century, that of “a portrayed interior”, without human figures.
An example of this is the Malmaison watercolor, begun in 1812 and complet-
ed twenty years later, which represents a living room with an armchair with
cashmere shawl on it. Another watercolor of 1807 suggests that the shawl in
question belonged to Josephine, Napoleon’s first wife, who had left that chair
twenty years – and life eighteen years – before. A slight shiver runs through
these deserted interiors, and that’s why we generally take care to put happy
people in furniture catalogues and advertisements. Because a room without
a single living person hides the secret of being, of what was there before our
birth and will still be there after our death. These silent servants (like the coat-
rack, the silent servant who literally holds our clothes in the evening) obey us
without a word but, just as in the Hegelian dialectic of servant and master, will
eventually prevail.

4.3.3 Discobolus and Brillo Box

We can go back from Warhol to the roots of classic art, not only for the serial-
ity that unites Discobolus and Brillo Box, but also for the religious and political
meaning of Warhol’s choice. Indeed, together with Campbell’s soups and Coca
Cola bottles, he shows us images of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor (no less
beautiful than Nefertiti), Mao (no less powerful than Cosroe), John Lennon (no
less influential than Marcus Aurelius) and, of course, Queen Elizabeth. These
figures are not different from those of Aphrodite, Minerva, Zeus or Augustus:
they have the same numinous function. And this brings us back to the aes-
thetic religion, but through another way, which has nothing to do with the
aura that surrounds the artwork that does not claim to be beautiful, but with
the beauty of the objects produced by modernity. This perhaps can teach us
something. Classicism cannot only be reactivated by going back to its origins
and finding the formless, the Dionysian, and the Oriental, which make it liable
to new hybridizations with Wagner and the music of the future, and perhaps
46 Ferraris

with politically incorrect (Heidegger) or oversimplified (Black Athena40) politi-

cal projects, in agreement with the strategy inaugurated by Nietzsche. We can
follow another strategy, and show how the fracture brought by modernity
is much less radical than it seems. By this I do not mean (as Bruno Latour
argued) that we have never been modern (we have been, and too much so),
but rather that modernity is not as modern as it is supposed to be. In fact, I
intend to show that classicism (together with antiquity and even prehistory)
already has, within it, characteristics that modernity claimed to own exclu-
sively. Therefore, citing Joseph Berchoux, a Frenchman a bit older than Latour,
the question “Who will free us from the Greeks and the Romans?” can be an-
swered with serenity: “Nobody, not even Rimbaud, not even Warhol, not even
Jeff Koons – let alone Philippe Starck’s lemon squeezer or the Bialetti Moka
express”.

4.4 Article 4. The Commodity Is the Exemplary Thing

Supermarkets, bathroom fixtures shops, galleries. What’s the difference?
Answering the question “what is a thing?”, Austin said that it is a moderate-
sized specimen of dry goods.41 Or a familiar object, as Alfred Jules Ayer put
it a few years earlier,42 with the same flat ontology attitude that puts every-
thing on the same level – in this case, the supermarket shelf. After all, when
Proust argues that attaching theories to artworks is like leaving the price tag
attached to a gift,43 he excellently notes that the work of art is a commod-
ity with a price, which it politely keeps hidden in agreement with the maxim
ars est celare artem.
And it has always been this way. One of the most strident and enlighten-
ing antinomies of the twentieth century was the contrast between classical
music and commercial music, which neglected the fact that people pay just
the same, to attend both classical music and pop music concerts. And above
all, it overlooked the fact that between classical music and pop music it was the
former that became commercial first, by means of a system of conservatories,
orchestras, directors, chapel masters, and patrons that in the ancestor of popu-
lar music did not exist. Indeed, pop was rather a matter of entertainment for

40 Cf. M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Piscataway:
Rutgers University Press, 1987.
41 J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, London: Oxford University Press 1962, p. 8.
42 Alfred Jules Ayer defined things “familiar objects”, cf. A. J. Ayer, The Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge (1940), London: Macmillan, p. 2.
43 M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Time Regained (1927), New York: Modern Library 1999,
vol. IV.
From Fountain to Moleskine 47

parties and convivial moments which, at most, was repaid with a glass of wine
and a seat at the table.
Thus, the commodity is not the opposite of the work of art. It is the essence
of it. In fact, the commodity is not just the hell of the market, as claimed by
cheap moralists; it is also, and above all, a promise of happiness, which does
not lose value by not being kept (denying this would mean, for example, that
Baudelaire’s Passante, being fugitive and therefore not keeping her promise of
happiness, is fraudulent) .

4.4.1 Promises of Happiness

In 1882, Émile Zola published Le bonheur des dames, a story revolving around
one of the first department stores. Good for women, it was said with a good
degree of sexism. But a little later, in the Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke
tried to show the angel “how happy a thing can be”. Objects are happy above
all because they are beautiful, and because they are still there after we’re gone,
without effort, without struggle and without carrying the burden of boredom,
looking at us with an Egyptian smile: “I was who you are, you will be what I am”.
What I am saying is no secret. Let’s take any museum of ancient art. In fact,
it is a very large collection of readymade objects that were not designed essen-
tially as works of art: lamps, buckles, swords, sarcophagi, plates and amphorae,
glasses and cruets. We often look at them with aesthetic devotion, as well as
with an antiquarian interest. But recall Sylvia Plath’s lines: “Let me have my
copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots |Bloom about me like night flowers,
with a good smell. They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
|Under my feet in a neat parcel. I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark, |And
the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.”44
People will always die, and leave objects behind. So, let’s try to imagine the
situation of a museum of “modern” art (that is, of our times) two thousand
years from now. What will we find? Let me make an uncomplicated prediction.
It is difficult to think that what will remain of the twentieth century will be
the works whose priority was not beauty. Perhaps they will be preserved for
documentary and ethnographic reasons, or as a somewhat sadistic curiosity,
as happens in the museums of torture or of the Inquisition. But surely what
will remain are “real” objects: once it was the Olivetti lettera 32, today it is iPods
and iPads, cars and Japanese markers, Moleskine notebooks and 1950s fans,
jukeboxes and Mont Blanc pens.
It is obvious that these objects have a culturally recognized aesthetic digni-
ty, since their beauty facilitates their purchase, and they are kept in the Design

44 S. Plath, Last Words (1961) in The Collected Poems. New York: Harper, 2018.
48 Ferraris

section at MOMA and other institutions. But more surely and more profoundly,
what will facilitate their survival, just like in museums of ancient art, is not
so much their design character, but the fact that they are legion, like the ter-
racotta army that guards the emperor’s tomb. Perhaps, among the most fragile,
what will survive are the magnifications, because they are made of more resis-
tant materials: the wooden Brillo Box instead of the cardboard one. Or perhaps,
even more ironically, the readymades will only survive for their object value,
or regular objects will be mistaken for readymade items. They are what con-
stitutes our serial canon (which reaches out to the equally serial classic canon
found in museums of ancient art). This canon is identified with three Bs.

4.4.2 Beautification
The work must be beautiful, otherwise nobody buys it. Commodities must
not be daring and shocking, but must be reconciled with the public, as in the
passage from Joyce to increasingly affable literature. Value is given to hedonic
aspects previously made unsuitable by the criticism of “retinal art” and con-
ceptual negativity. This is true both for real works of art, which indeed are rare,
and above all for quasi-works of art: design, fashion, food, body care and, in
general, the return to classic hedonism after modern asceticism.
With design comes the desire to produce a beautiful and functional
object – an activity that, unlike art, requires more than the approval of a critic
and a gallery owner. A designer has to deal with the need for functionality,
technical reproducibility, and industrial feasibility. Hence, a paradox on which
perhaps it is worth reflecting. The intimidated common sense accepts that
anything can be a work of art. But at the same time design teaches us how dif-
ficult it is to produce good objects, and shows that it is not at all true that, for
example, any object can be a design object. As a result, if it is true that being
a work of art is, for an object, something like a sanctification, while being a
design object is, so to speak, a lesser promotion, a sort of beatification, one
would say that in the twentieth century it was easier to be saints than blessed.
Design, unlike Great Conceptual Art, cannot afford romance, the excess of
meaning and aesthetic indifference.45 No, it must preserve some classical bal-
ance between interior and exterior, as well as between form and function. It is
from this observation, I believe, that one should start, not to return to a pre-
modern beauty, but rather to highlight the unsaid of the readymade, its secret
face, and its truth. First of all, as I suggested with the example of the museum,

45 Or, as Bruno Munari recalled when finding the differences between designer and artist,
the former always has to do with the need to find solutions for everyday problems. See
B. Munari, Artista e designer (1971), Bari: Laterza.
From Fountain to Moleskine 49

there is a relationship between the object and the environment. The urinal
outside a museum, for example in a landfill, would not have generated any
conflict, which shows that Duchamp was not fully sincere when he declared
his own indifference to “retinal art”. On the contrary, he was very sensitive
to this fact, but, indeed, he kept it secret. In short, the public endures many
“vexations” because beauty has taken refuge elsewhere, in a different world
compared to the intimidation of Great Conceptual Art and the indulgence of
Kitsch-Camp-Pop, although it is willing to dialogue with both. It can be found
not only in the very elegant walls of galleries housing artworks whose priority
is not beauty, but also in the design of furniture, hotels and restaurants, and
above all in the number of splendid objects that are industrially produced.
But, in fact, wasn’t this also the deepest secret of readymades? The fact that
the object had its own character, its hidden beauty? It seems that even the
most deliberately outrageous of readymades, the urinal, had been exposed for
the first time by a gallerist who found it beautiful, – that is, for a reason op-
posed to that officially declared by Duchamp. In these objects, which are hast-
ily defined as “minor art”, today there is the basis for major art, for something
that can allow us to overcome the age of Great Conceptual Art. This beauty
has always been there, waiting, wherever there are objects, these secondary
witnesses of our lives: in attics, junk shops or in those wonderful archives of
objects called hardware stores. Nails, pliers, hammers, keys, screws and thou-
sands of other objects – all meticulously classified (otherwise how could you
find them?) – constitute an inventory of worlds and therefore of possible sto-
ries, from which to draw hundreds of novels (like a couple who goes to buy
nails and a hammer to hang paintings in their new house, and then he or she
comes back a few years later to change the lock) and above all a potentiality of
forms whose aesthetic resources are available to every narrator.

4.4.3 Beatification
Marx wrote that commodities are fetishes that lead us into the “mist-enveloped
regions of the religious world”.46 And it is entirely correct to say that shopping

46 “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character
of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of
that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour
is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between
the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become com-
modities, social things. […] In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse
to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the
human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation
both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the
50 Ferraris

centres are today’s basilicas, just as it is entirely correct to define certain goods
as dutiful (must) and religious (cult). In fact, if more than once people have
sought to drive out the merchants from the temple, this is, trivially, because
the temple is a market in which intangible assets are traded; and the market is
a temple, as shown by the neoclassical facades of stock exchanges.
So it is true that there is no more sacred art (understood as art about sa-
cred subjects) and that we can no longer build beautiful churches. But in new
and often beautiful cathedrals – museums – there is perpetual adoration. This
being the case, then, art is not dead at all, but it is more alive than ever, and
indeed has taken the place of religion. Which is paradoxical, but not too much:
the aesthetic religion that classicism attributed to the Greeks and Romans
celebrates its glory today, under our eyes, in processions to museums, equiva-
lent to purification rites, as well as in the priest-like absorbed tone with which
the shop assistant of a design shop illustrates the merits of a lamp. Is there a
real conceptual difference, say, between ritual processions, a fashion show,
a rock concert, or a football match? In the Zeppelinfeld of Nuremberg, in 1935,
the altar of Pergamum was rebuilt to welcome Hitler: this demonstrates how
(again, contrary to what modernity assumes of itself) the division between
religion, politics and aesthetics is far from being overcome. The place of the
exhibition assumes as much importance as the work exhibited, and has a
strongly aestheticized character.
A beatification takes place, which occurs in spaces of great beauty. The
value evaporates from the object and migrates elsewhere, and is placed in
the surroundings, hovers in the environment, with a transition from the ergon
to the parergon, from the work to its frame. Then, from the frame, the aesthetic
appeal can once again concentrate in one spot: not in the artworks, but in the
capital element of the modern museum that is the museum shop, where you
find objects that participate in the ritual and make it part of your life in the
form of bags, ties, pencils and various pieces of stationery. I would like to prove
this with some notes about museums, where – this is the central question – the
“normal” aesthetic experience is rarely given.
Venice, Punta della Dogana. This is the typical case of the comforting func-
tion entrusted to the context. The works of art are not all beautiful, even if as
usual the visitors murmur “beautiful, beautiful”. Some are ugly, or irrelevant,
and the eye, inevitably, always falls on the surroundings, not finding sufficient

products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of
labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable
from the production of commodities”. K. Marx, Capital (1867–1894), Volume One, Part I,
Chapter One, Section Four, marxists.org.
From Fountain to Moleskine 51

nourishment in the works. In the end, like everyone else, I am attracted by

Fucking hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman: huge scale models depicting a great
Nazi epic, in fact a kind of visual version of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.
The search for meaning, frustrated by most works and offset by the beauty of
the frame, polarizes in front of this recognizable installation (visitors stop say-
ing “beautiful, beautiful” but say “it must have taken so much time, so much
patience …”).
Rovereto, Mart, 2007–2008, an exhibition on the use of words in art. Here
the context is barer, Mario Botta’s wide spaces seem to leave greater auton-
omy to the works, and so the works take revenge on the environment. There
are pieces ranging from futurism and Russian avant-gardes to the most con-
temporary contemporaries, obviously passing through Duchamp. And in
Duchamp’s room there is the classic fire-fighting installation – the glass with
inscribed instructions and a rolled-up pump inside. However, given that there
are Duchamp’s readymades all around, it also seems like a readymade, and it
works perfectly.
Paris, Louvre: typical scene, a classic. Mona Lisa. You can only ever see it
from a distance, shielded by a wall of Japanese tourists. It is a view that one
typically has very young, during a school trip, and is accompanied by melan-
choly: why does that distant image fail to immediately arise the dreamy and
fantastic transportation they said it would? Nothing, we are standing there, far
away, our feet hurt, and we begin to question the Great Art.
Naples, Reggia di Capodimonte, a few years ago, a Caravaggio exhibition. I
get there late, there are few paintings on display and the entrance cost is quite
expensive, so I have a very rare experience: I am alone in the museum, face to
face with the five or six paintings by Caravaggio. The result is the opposite
to that of Mona Lisa: those works hanging there, without any other visitor to
look at them, give me the impression of being fake.
Penultimate experience, already less frustrating. I’m in Dresden, and I first
visit the collection of pre-Duchamp readymades, i.e. the collection of weap-
ons. Then I go up to see the paintings. On the ground floor I see the portrait of
a seventeenth-century gentleman with a melancholy look and I discover that
it is Maurice, Prince of Orange. I go up two floors and I see a familiar face, I
get closer and realize that it is a second portrait of a Maurice of Orange, older
this time. As if to say that the face is not new to me, and this gives me a certain
aesthetic pleasure. Someone will tell me that no, this is not aesthetic pleasure,
that the real aesthetic pleasure is different, but I honestly do not understand
why.
The religious experience that we are now used to associating with aesthetic
pleasure I have in Los Angeles, at the Paul Getty Museum. I went there because
52 Ferraris

I had a conference the day before and in the evening I had to leave for Italy.
Without a car there’s only so much you can do in LA, so I took a taxi to the
museum, waiting for the time to go to the airport. I have plenty of time and
the place is wonderful, with a stupendous sea view. I walk around without
haste, and when I’m tired enough to feel the need to sit down, I find my-
self standing in front of James Ensor’s immense Christ’s Entry into Brussels.
Completely unexpected, it strikes me, and really gives me the idea of a miracle.
Well, this is the kind experience that we are told should happen in art – but, at
least for me, it is very rare indeed.
The most surreal museum of my life, however, was not an ordinary museum,
but a strange metamuseum that I once found without looking for it, a shop in
Turin collecting all the gadgets of museum shops all over the world, from of the
various MOMA, MOCA, MET, and so forth. Only the MOBA was missing. In my
opinion the owner had understood the essence of the cult that is celebrated in
museums, and had collected its relics. Nevertheless, as is usually said of great
artists, his genius must have been misunderstood, and the shop, if I’m not mis-
taken, has closed down.

4.4.4 Brandification
When objects are unique or almost there is no need for strategies to identify
them. At most, one identifies a mode of artisan production or (in the case of
food products) an indication of origin (Bordeaux or Port wine, etc.). But when
the commodities are produced serially and in a standardized manner, they
become identifiable through their brand, which also guarantees their quality,
origin, and all those characteristics that in a pre-industrial economy were guar-
anteed (if they were) by the the manufacturer or trader.
Brillo constitutes, so to speak, the awareness and the aesthetic enhance-
ment of a circumstance that in itself was accidental, and derives simply from
the progressive establishment of an industrial and standardized production
system, on the one hand, which therefore, on the other, is identified by an
idiomatic characteristic that makes it recognizable. It is this spirit of com-
modification that condenses into Brillo. “Brillo” is a proper noun, a registered
trademark, and therefore it is an extension of the logic of the duplicity of the
signature: on the one hand, it is unrepeatable and individual and, on the other,
is made to be repeated indefinitely to identify an industrial product. This logic,
if transferred to art, just as happens with Brillo, involves a significant – though
not always perceived – transformation of the Artworld, because it produces a
rapprochement between the world of a peculiar type of commodity, i.e. the
work of art, and the world of commodities in general. This is the intermedi-
ate stage of a dialectic that will lead, in the case of Moleskine notebooks, to
From Fountain to Moleskine 53

the complete identification between artistic commodities and commodities

in general in the name of design. On the one hand, the artwork cites a brand
(Brillo, Coca Cola, or branded people like Marilyn). On the other hand, the ar-
tistic brand is called to enhance the value of the commodity (for example, the
Picasso signature in the homonymous Citroën model).
Brillo is the culmination a story that dates back to at least 1812, when, in
his account of the catastrophe of the Grande Armée, Joseph de Maistre re-
called that the Cossacks were selling Breguet watches stolen from the French,
and to 1838, when his brother Xavier, in Le Philosophe de l’Odenwald, tells us
about a “wonderful Breguet gold watch”. A family obsession? No: the Breguet
watch appreciated by Napoleon, the same watch that Pushkin gave his Eugene
Onegin, was a sign of the age. There is a moment in which the brand, the result
of industrialization, comes into history and art: the Porter beer in The Magic
Mountain, the Waterman pen in the Acquainted with Grief, Ezra Pound called
“Stetson” by Hemingway because of his wide-brimmed hat, the Rossetti shoes
in Thomas Bernhard, the use of the adjective “branded” as a mark of quasi-
aesthetic appreciation, as secularized sanctity or bourgeois nobility, up to the
brands of automobiles almost everywhere. Style was the characteristic trait of
the artist, the mark of the worker in his work (as Descartes put it, speaking
of the idea of infinity that would be, in us humans, the signature of God). But
when the industry begins to produce commodities in series, the brand comes
forward, no longer distinguishing the individual but the species. And it is not
surprising if the artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility finds in the
brand the substitute of the artist’s signature.

5 Moleskine: The Fusion

Fast-forward thirty years. Conceived in 1997 by a Milanese company, the

Moleskine notebook was marketed at a time when, strictly speaking,
the spread of computers was supposed to make handwriting obsolete. It is far
from original and indeed focuses on the traditional aura around the basic note-
books allegedly used by Bruce Chatwin and Hemingway; moreover, its paper
does not have any special qualitative characteristics, because if you write
with a fountain pen the ink shows on the other side of the page. Despite this,
Moleskine has become a universally widespread brand (you can see it in every
airport and in many train stations, there is no American university that does
not have a personalized Moleskine, etc.). And it has evolved over time, creat-
ing a system of pens, personalized notebooks, cases, backpacks, bags, etc – in
short, it has turned into a life project. Is this really outside of the realm of art?
54 Ferraris

Are we talking about something else entirely? Some would say yes. I believe
instead that this is a renegotiation of the artistic contract. Personally, I con-
sider it even more ingenious than that drafted by Duchamp, which after all
was still dripping with romanticism (the artist transfigures the object, which
becomes an Artwork by magic). That is why I am amazed that the same person
can stand pensively in front of Fountain and then demonstrate against Burger
King (it does happen).
In 1917, at the time of Caporetto and the October Revolution, Duchamp ex-
hibited a urinal in a gallery and in 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson began the
American military escalation in Vietnam, Warhol exhibited larger-scale re-
productions of the Brillo soap pad boxes. The logic that presided over these
artistic gestures marked an era, but this era is now gone. The world in which
they existed was a society of standardized industrial production, marked by
the centrality of commodities, and characterized by the predominant role of
communication (advertising). In a completely coherent fashion, Duchamp
and Warhol transformed standardized goods into works of art, and they did so
with a provocative attitude that caused clamour – with the mediation of crit-
ics and other happy few of the Artworld – in the world of communication. At
the time of Raphael none of this would have been possible. Standardized pro-
duction did not exist, therefore not only painters, but also ordinary craftsmen,
created unique pieces. And communication was not necessary, given that the
artists knew very well whom to address to make themselves known: to great lay
or ecclesiastical patrons. Besides, the latter had no need for the recommenda-
tions of art critics and experts to be advised in their purchases, as instead was
normal for the twentieth-century bourgeoisie, uncertain of its own taste and
above all eager to make investments.
On closer inspection, the world of Duchamp and Warhol, today, is no less
remote than that of Raphael. Even if we have not yet fully acknowledged it,
we are witnessing a “documedia revolution”, which consists in the union be-
tween the institutional power of documents (the web is the largest archive
that history has ever known) and the dynamism of the media (we are all both
receivers and producers of messages, whereas until not long ago we used to be
only receivers). This revolution has transformed not only knowledge but the
whole social world, with a speed and a power whose only equivalent can be
found in the capitalist revolution of the early nineteenth century. However,
we have not yet conceptualized this transformation and we are used to inter-
preting it as an evolution of capitalism, of the age of commodities and com-
munication. The analysis of art is no exception: museums, critics, artists and
galleries often behave as if we were still in Duchamp’s time, which is a bit
surprising in a world (the artworld) that has traditionally been conceived in
From Fountain to Moleskine 55

terms of avant-garde, and now appears to be in a rear-guard position – and in

good company, together, for example, with information, politics, and impor-
tant parts of industry. There have been many changes indeed. Here I will try
to roughly summarize them in three points, with the certainty that they will
do not exhaust the theme, but with the hope that they may shed a little light
on it.
1. End of the “art world”. Twentieth-century art was governed by mediation
structures (the so-called “art world”) composed of artists, critics, galleries
and collectors. Now that the web presents itself as a universal mediation
structure, one has good reason to think that this world will end up extinct
like travel agencies, and that above all it will no longer be able to support
the idea that “art” is whatever is thus defined by the “art world”. In fact,
now that many people no longer trust doctors, it would be surprising if
they still believed critics. Now that everything can be found on Amazon,
it would be surprising if an artist still had to contact a gallery owner. And
now that there are a million self-published books every year, it would be
surprising if the artist were still considered a rare being who is visited by
the gods.
2. End of rarity. Art has traditionally been conceived within an economy
of rarity, which was part of a more general rarity of documents: making
a painting was even rarer and more intentional than drafting a contract.
And even the much debated technical reproduction of art has not really
changed the situation, because it is true that you could have a thousand
copies of Mona Lisa, but you still had to go and look for them, for ex-
ample in expensive art books. Now a quick Google search can help us find
even the rarest and most improbable work, while Pinterest overwhelms
us with images profiled on our tastes. Also, one could very well do like
Bill Gates, and project artworks on the wall so as to choose whatever one
wants whenever one wants it. On the other hand, now that producing
unique pieces is no more expensive than producing standard pieces,
uniqueness is within everyone’s reach: if a 3D printer can make a pair of
running shoes at home, calibrated exactly on my feet and on my pace,
why should not I create the perfect personalized artwork, based on my
taste as described (even better than what I could do) through my activi-
ties on the web?
3. End of ascesis. Art has imposed much asceticism on the observer, espe-
cially in the twentieth century. Beauty and pleasure did not matter, or
rather they migrated elsewhere: to fashion, to care of the body, to foods
and wines transformed into art objects. But true art, great art, had to
make people suffer, be incomprehensible, be ugly or indifferent. Now,
56 Ferraris

some elitist sects might gather to listen to dodecaphonic music and stare
Marina Abramović in the eyes, with the same retro spirit with which they
would go to a party meeting, buy vinyl records or hire a typist. But the
majority of people enjoys high-quality products that – I repeat- are
strongly individualized thanks to “profiling”, on the web and off the web.
Has the time finally come for the death of art? Of course not: on the con-
trary, this will be its rebirth, since art is made to give pleasure and recog-
nition, not boredom and intimidation.
In this context, the point is to write a new contract, the last among those drawn
up between artists and users in the last hundred years.

5.1 Article 1. The Object Is Not Enough, You Need Design

For a few decades now, “manufacture” – a term that is tellingly anachronistic –
has been compared to the problem faced by painters in the nineteenth century.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to think that the ongoing documedia revolution
is the popularization of an avant-garde attitude. This study has already been
carried out for the sociological figure of the artist, who seems to embody the
instability of the contemporary worker,47 but such an approach captures a less
significant phenomenon than the transformation of commodities and capital:
the avant-garde really seems to anticipate and manifest the forms and develop-
ments of both. Before, art followed the repetitive rhythm of industry – now it
is industry that follows the claim to individualization of art. What can one do
when the hard work (reproduction for painters, production for manufactur-
ing) is no longer done by hand, but mechanically, and the machine works on
its own?

5.1.1 Intangible Assets

Well, one can bet it all on design. However, design is not primarily the concep-
tion of aesthetically beautiful shapes, sometimes at the expense of functional-
ity (in the face of aesthetic indifference). The spider-juicer and the chirping
kettle always carry the risk of a grotesque evoking a world of cast iron capi-
tals, rococo radiators, and L’art industriel, the newspaper directed by Madame

47 P.-M. Menger, Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme (2003),

Paris: Seuil; Les intermittents du spectacle. Sociologie du travail flexible (2005), EHESS,
new expanded edition 2011; Profession artiste. Extension du domaine de la création (2005),
Paris: Textuel; Le travail créateur. S’accomplir dans l’incertain (2009), Paris: le Seuil 2014;
Être artiste. Œuvrer dans l’incertitude (2012), Bruxelles: Al Dante & Aka; The Economics
of Creativity. Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty (2014), Cambridge (MA): Harvard
University Press.
From Fountain to Moleskine 57

Arnoux’s idiotic husband. Might as well stick with Fountain. The design that
matters, and which I propose to call “strong design”, consists in taking an ob-
ject whose production is delocalized and automated, and whose function is
essentially useless – just like the Moleskine notebook – and “create a new way
of thinking abound that object “. Wasn’t this Duchamp’s project? Except that
now it permeates the whole world. Duchamp was indeed a prophet, but his
prophecy concerned primarily industry.
In industry today, as in art yesterday, the solution to automation cannot be
reduced to “handcraft”, but must focus on the notion of “creactivity”, which is
not a gross spelling error, but a variant of creativity on which I will concentrate
in the next article of the contract. The project is the essence of art, which is
no longer defined by the object and its potential beauty: in the same way, now
that the production of goods is delocalized, automated and metamorphosed,
industrial activity undergoes this same process of spiritualization, i.e. of pro-
duction of intangible assets. Here is what art can teach industry. Art has dealt
over a hundred years in advance with the dematerialization of products that
now characterizes industry. A hundred years later than art, the whole capital
world has now landed in Arcadia. The production is transferred to developing
countries, while innovation is available to everyone. Industrial countries retain
the advantage of owning data, but China is the one winning this race.
The real advantage lies in intangible assets, which are the real object of the
strong design that I am proposing.48 Consider two fundamental characteristics
of design. First, its instrumentality: design is born from the attempt to face
certain problems, and often solutions are found through practice, by doing.
Secondly, its operativity: in design the result is often related to how things go
beyond the project, in relation to an operativity that is independent of the in-
tellectual and planning level that allows one to find the right tools to address
a problem. The power of Google or Amazon, just to make the usual examples,
comes from an innovative scheme based on the development of old things
(the file in the case of Google, the postal market in the case of Amazon), but in
a new context, understanding its full documedia potential.

48 On the transformation of labour towards immateriality (design) cf.: A. Gorz, Critique
of Economic Reason, London, Verso, 1989 and Id., The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and
Capital, London, Seagull Books, 2010. On the change in manufacture, see http://www.csl
.unifi.it/cfgc/speciali/living-with-machines-2017/. On Robotics and Humanities:
 http://www.bbs.unibo.it/hp/event/donald-norman-design-driven-transformation
-for-the-21st-century%E2%80%8B/. On Industry 4.0: http://tnviewer.getpixelbook.com/
07611766997b37388269009c5af1e344/?p=2.
58 Ferraris

5.1.2 The Primacy of Consumerism

It is now a question of taking the measures of a new set-up in which the so-
cial world, and the documents that constitute its backbone, converge with the
media world, creating a situation in which recording (the traditional sphere of
bureaucracy, economy, and capital) and communication (the sphere of mass
media, which have become individualized thanks to social networks) come to
constitute a single reality. In this growing documediation we do not find the
dream of an immaterial world, as postmodernists thought. On the contrary, we
find precisely a strong design capable of shaping intangible assets.
“People don’t know what they want,” Steve Jobs told a journalist who asked
him why he had not done any market research before conceiving the iPhone.
They may not know what they want, but this does not make them marginal,
because when production is automated, the central point becomes what can-
not be automated: that is, consumerism. The consumer, who was completely
irrelevant to the Fountain model, is now back to the forefront, even more so
than in the traditional art system. In street art, as well as in fashion, we under-
stand the idea that the true creator is the consumer. The point, therefore, is not
to make the product known to consumers, as in the Fountain model (which
for this reason played the provocation card), but rather to know the tastes of
consumers – in terms of commodities, art, politics, and so on. This explains
why big data, which today can be technically obtained, are so axiologically
important.
From this point of view, nothing is more ordinary and yet more paradig-
matic than a smartphone: indeed, it has outlined a new form of life, which we
are living today in the documedia revolution, in the boom of documents and
messages that characterize the digital age. Today, commodities are treated as
documents, as projects (think of 3D manufacturing), and documents are the
fundamental commodity (think of big data); there is no difference between
manual work and intellectual work, since the modest manual work that unites
us all is typing on a keyboard; the difference between living-time and work-
ing-time has vanished, which means that we are all living the life of an artist,
whether we like it or not (once painters were the only ones to work on Sundays,
today we all get the occasional Sunday e-mail, and in any case when surfing the
web we produce value, i.e. we work). This is the world in which, as we read in
books on the web, the difference between the book value and the stock market
value of a company is determined by its brand, talent and strategy.

5.2 Article 2. Design Is Creactivity

Here comes the hard part. We’ve just seen what a brand such Moleskine is.
What talent is we can imagine: it is something like genius, just a little more
From Fountain to Moleskine 59

practical and without self-destructive excesses. But what could strategy be?
Certainly not something purely immaterial, given that Hitler was saved in the
Rastenburg attack by the very table covered with papers on which he elab-
orated the strategic plans of the Wehrmacht. But, leaving wood and paper
aside, consider the strategy to create a new way of thinking about an object:
is it pure inspiration without perspiration? Or is it something with respect to
which the object is indifferent, a pure idea or a pretext? In Duchamp’s case,
one might think so. When it comes to Warhol and Moleskine, though, certain-
ly not. Consider someone who knew quite a bit about strategy like Helmuth
von Moltke, the architect of the Prussian triumph of 1870. In 1871, in the year
of the Lettres du voyant, he defined strategy a “system of expedients” (System
von Aushilfen). And he added: “Only the profane see the course of a campaign
as the coherent execution of an original idea, previously elaborated in all its
details by the commander, who remained faithful to it until the end”.
Creativity is creactivity: one creates only by reacting, in contact with the fric-
tion of reality, and practicing what Luigi Pareyson called “formativity”49 – the
artistic practice finds its own rules as it goes. There is no spirit without letter.
The object and the technical apparatus are never extrinsic, and indeed are the
occasion for Moltke’s “system of expedients” to emerge. They are the wedge:
the apparently dead and instrumental moment that can be transformed into
art, in spite of Benedetto Croce’s pure intuition (an in spite of many praises
of creativity as a gift from the gods). The wedge, indeed, titles a paragraph of
Pareyson’s Aesthetics, and Umberto Eco has dedicated a memorable essay
to it.50 Creativity, in short, is reactivity: an active reaction to technical emer-
gences and pre-existing constraints. The constraint thus becomes a possibil-
ity, without referring to some previous meaning but, on the contrary, bringing
out the meaning from the constraint and the resistance. Faced with technical
reproduction, and above all technology qua reproduction, twentieth-century
art anticipated the fundamental characteristics of the revolution in progress,
that is, the intervention of technology, the growth of automation and its condi-
tion of possibility – recording. It will come as no surprise that today the avant-
garde model is equally omnipresent in management, advertising, and politics,
as they all must amaze, surprise, shock and take people aback. This creativity
is articulated in documentality, formativity and performativity.

49 L. Pareyson, Estetica. Teoria della formatività (1954), Milano: Bompiani 1988.
50 U. Eco, “Sporcizie della forma” (1993), in Rivista di Estetica, 40–41 (monographic issue,
Luigi Pareyson, estetica e ontologia della libertà, XXXII, pp. 17–23).
60 Ferraris

5.2.1 Documentality
The thesis underlying the hypothesis of documentality is that the glue of soci-
ety must be sought in the sphere of the fixation of actions and of construction
of social objects. This perspective can be structured into four parts.51
1. Life and documents. What people can do, in terms of businesses and
personal life, is strongly conditioned by – if not completely dependent
on – documents. Recording is what makes social objects possible, things
like promises, bets, tasks, and money: they require communication, but
they must be fixed as recordings, otherwise they would be empty talk. A
stock exchange session without price lists, a marriage without register, a
sale without a contract, a court without a sentence would be frivolous ex-
ercises indeed, and if you knew you’d forget everything you are reading I
doubt you would have bothered reading these lines. We produce acts that
do not necessarily have to be linguistic,52 and which acquire their mean-
ing only if they are inscribed. Once inscribed they acquire the power
that we know they have, from signatures that decide of war and peace,
to typos that cause crashes in the stock exchange. This is why documents
are so crucial: this is why we line up to get them and we are desperate
if we lose them, and this is why documentality is such an important in-
gredient in society. This is why the documedia revolution prophesied by
Derrida in Grammatology took place.
2. Texts and motivations. In a way, even people’s profound motivations
and initiatives depend on texts. In a first, more obvious and elementary
sense, the role of documentality in the constitution of intentionality
concerns the advantages ensured by sharing plans in the management
of collective intentionality.53 Acting based on written documents is the
secret of military effectiveness, but more extensively it is the foundation

51 For some developments of the theory of documentality, see: B. Smith, “Diagrams,

Documents, and the Meshing of Plans” (2013), in A. Benedek, K. Nyíri (ed. by), How To
Do Things With Pictures: Skill, Practice, Performance (Visual Learning, 3), pp. 165–179;
D. Tagliafico (ed. by), “Documentalità. L’ontologia degli oggetti sociali” (2007), in Rivista
di Estetica, 36; E. Casetta, P. Kobau, I. Mosca (ed. by), “A partire da Documentalità” (2012),
in Rivista di Estetica, 50; P. Bojanić, E. Casetta, G. Torrengo (ed. by), “Social Objects. From
Intentionality to Documentality” (2014), in Rivista di Estetica, 57; M. Ferraris, L. Caffo (ed.
by), “Documentality” (2014), in The Monist, 97:2.
52 R. Sacco, “Il diritto muto” (1993), in Rivista di diritto civile, I: 689.
53 B. Smith, “Diagrams, Documents, and the Meshing of Plans” (2013), in A. Benedek, K. Nyíri
(ed. by), How To Do Things With Pictures: Skill, Practice, Performance (Visual Learning, 3),
pp. 165–179; S. A. Shapiro, “Massively Shared Agency” (2015), in M. Vargas, G. Yaffe (ed.
by), Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman, New York:
Oxford University Press.
From Fountain to Moleskine 61

of social action, as evidenced by the importance of bureaucracy in the

formation and management of power. Today’s algorithmic governance
and the fact that stock-market decisions are now taken by computers are
just two of the countless examples of the primacy of documentality over
intentionality.
3. The origin of individual intentionality. More decisively, documentality is
the condition for the genesis of individual intentionality. It is not true
that first we have intentions and then these intentions can be fixed in
documents. The opposite is true: first we receive a document-based edu-
cation (rites, schooling), and only later can this education be transformed
into intentionality. The modeling role of the Homeric poems or of sacred
texts shows how documentality underlies most social dynamics. The
crusades would be difficult to conceive without the Bible and the Koran.
The human becomes such through an education that involves learning
a language, rituals, and attitudes, that is, documental apparatuses that
precede, and do not follow, the formation of consciousness and moral
responsibility. This becomes particularly evident in highly mediated soci-
eties, as evidenced by the documedia revolution, which becomes the best
vantage point to capture the dynamics of documentality. Behavioural
styles and feelings (think of the role of literature, cinema and songs in
the definition of love) are strongly oriented by documentality. And think
of all the self-help books on how to be perfect parents, effective manag-
ers, etc.
4. Derived intentionality. Of course, one can always object that technology
and documents alone do not speak, it takes humans to make them talk.
To this I answer: not even humans speak for themselves, it takes other
humans to activate the form of language, and for this to happen we need
the mediation of a code, i.e. a document (the language must be public,
shared and must preserve its meaning). The same is true for education
and for the formation of taste, will and intentionality: the humanization
of the human requires the processes of training, imitation and motiva-
tion, which in turn require documents. From this point of view, the great
teaching that can be drawn from the idea of “deconstruction” consists
precisely in the need to recognize immediacy – starting from intentional-
ity – as the effect and result of a mediation.

5.2.2 Formativity
Mediation comes first. According to Pareyson, artistic practice finds its rules
as it goes. This, however, does not only hold for art, but applies to technology
in general, which on the one hand appears as the realm of iterativity, but on
62 Ferraris

the other presents itself as the sphere of inventiveness – which is all the more
interesting as it is exposed to chance. Nobody could foresee from the begin-
ning all the possible uses of the lever and the wheel (not to mention those of
more complex devices). So, the functions that philosophers often ascribe to a
human super-faculty, the imagination, should rather be attributed to the pos-
sibilities of recording, externalization and accumulation that are immanent to
technology.
The priority of mediation means that it is not necessary to have a concept
in order to act. It is enough to have competence without understanding,54 that
is, a way of doing and mediating. Art is a field in which the competence with-
out understanding typical of technology has always been theorized (“Sing, o
goddess” is ultimately the acknowledgement of this fact). The artist cannot ac-
count for why they created the artwork exactly that way (Leibniz’s doctrine
of nescio quid): ever since the invocation of the muse in Homeric incipits, art
has always been thought to be inspired in the artist. In other words, it comes
from the outside, it is not determined by the author, and most of the times the
latter’s descriptions of the compositional process appeal to unconscious ele-
ments, or to an automatism that guides its realization (the characters dictate
their actions as if they were alive, certain words – for example “nevermore” in
Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven – guide the whole composition).
Social interaction is another eminent example of formativity. The image of
human action as an unconscious practice that becomes aware only through his-
torical becoming (an image that comes from Vico up to Hegel and historicism)
fully reflects this circumstance. We do not know why we act a certain way, and
only sometimes can we explain it. Reciprocally, knowing the principles guiding
our actions does not make us more efficient (otherwise, the professors of the
military academies would be the greatest strategists, which almost never hap-
pens). Finally, coming to mathematics and seemingly more abstract forms of
thought, Alan Turing’s great discovery consists in understanding that, in order
to calculate, it is not necessary to know what mathematics is, but to have the
technical skills that enable calculation. What did Vico say again? Homo non
intelligendo fit omnia: humans act before understanding, and understanding, if
and when it comes, is not the premise (as the Cartesians think), but the result.
This is the intuition underlying the pragmatist “learning by doing”.55
Learning a language, painting a picture, but also performing a mathematical

54 Theorized with several examples in D. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The
Evolution of Minds, London: Penguin, 2017.
55 G. Maddalena, The Philosophy of Gesture (2015), Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
From Fountain to Moleskine 63

calculation, developing a theorem, devising a scientific experiment, etc. – these

disparate activities are not the result of an analysis, but rather have to do with
a synthetic operation. In other words, doing is not simply the execution of a
routine, but has a decisive role in the invention of the new. Even the most pre-
cise painter would sometimes find something unexpected while painting –
inventions that do not take place in the head, but outside, on the canvas, due
to a succession of actions and, possibly, of corrections (the so-called “repen-
tance”). Much in the same fashion, the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa
Ramanujan said he saw the formulas on the tongue of goddess Namagiri at
the temple, and was not able to justify them in a conventional manner: he saw
them in an intuitive and synthetic way, as external objects independent of his
mind, to the point that some – given that he often wrote down only solutions,
not calculations – claimed that he intuited the result but was not able to prove
it. To make yet another example, Umberto Eco, a theoretically very conscious
narrator, said several times that the novel started, for him, when the characters
began to act as following their own will, giving rise to a narrative that trans-
formed the author into a spectator: the development took place in the text, not
in the author’s mind.

5.2.3 Performativity
The asset is intangible but not immaterial. So much so that it produces
effects: documentality generates performativity.56 Drafting a project does not
mean giving a sensible colour to ideas, mainly on the two-dimensional sur-
face of a project, but producing effects – hopefully positive ones – in a three-
dimensional world. Now, what is the difference between a project and a
representation? The project follows an adaptation line of this type: Drawing
→ World. A representation instead follows a line of adaptation World →
Drawing. We are very willing to admit that representations can fail to represent
the world, and we can ideologize this failure with abstraction and conceptu-
ality: the fact remains that failure is a constituent part of the representation.
Strangely enough, we are not willing to recognize that a project also has failure,
deviation, modification, and accident as its constitutive (and not accidental)
characteristics. As if the project was exhausted in the representation, without
the world. And without considering that, more profoundly, the complete cycle
of a project is World → Drawing → World: from a social and natural world, to a
design, through various representational difficulties, and from here, through

56 A. Armando, G. Durbiano, Teoria del progetto architettonico. Dai disegni agli effetti (2017),
Roma: Carocci, “L’architettura degli effetti”, pp. 377–484.
64 Ferraris

various types of implementation difficulties, again to the world, both social

and natural.
We are a thrown project, Heidegger used to say, in this case thrown into an
institutional, bureaucratic, document-based universe. Without documentality
there can be no society, no intentionality and, ultimately, no projects either.
Furthermore, a project is such only when it is determined to the point of de-
tail. The best generals are those who manage to say everything concisely. The
worst ones are those that give confused orders that are variously interpretable.
Infinite interpretation fits neither war nor peace, neither death nor life. If this
is the case, however, we are more properly a dictated project, determined by
a universe that is intentional only to the extent that, first, it is institutional,
bureaucratic, and document-based. From the sketch to the building permit,
technology and bureaucracy are always there, not only as teleology, but also
as archaeology: that is, already as ideation, motivation, and an unavoidable
choice to be made in the articulation of the project.
But what is a project at this point and under these conditions? The project
is not a result, but a process. It is not a description, but a prescription and a
performance. That is, in the first place, an object independent of the subject
and its intentions (is this surprising? Think of how many times technologi-
cal devices have revealed functions and ends different from those they were
designed for – technology is as unpredictable as nature, hence its character
of “exaptation”). Secondly, it is a palimpsest that presupposes different pro-
cedures, before and after itself: the document, the narrative, the contract, the
prediction, the theatre – everything but a simple drawing. Thirdly, it is a social
object in relation to other social objects, that is, not a static representation,
but a cycle of recording, presentation, decision and institution. If we fail to
consider this, it is not simply a misunderstanding, but rather a repression: the
repression of the document dimension of the project as a symptom of a bigger
and more decisive repression – that of technology.
“Taking the unpredictability of the future seriously”, as is rightly suggested
in an important reflection on project ontology,57 means, in a word, thinking
about technology. Techne is above all mediation, it is the medium par excel-
lence. Because the point is precisely this: it is a constitutive mediation, the
original medium (the great dream of transcendental imagination: being
the common root of sensibility and intellect). The means are also ends, con-
trary to what is often posited by a widespread rhetoric that refers to absolute
planning. And long before existing in the architect’s minds, projects exist in the
environment (physical and social) around them. Here “society” does not mean

57 Ibid.
From Fountain to Moleskine 65

so much a concept, but above all the network of rules and bureaucracies that
constrain planning, and which are not simply limits but also, at the same time,
possibilities.

5.3 Article 3. The Web Requires a Copernican Revolution

The Marxist understanding of industrial capital and its social and economic
repercussions was based on the material conditions of capital production. For
the same reason, the analysis of documedia capital cannot disregard the exam-
ination of the web and the understanding of its fundamental characteristics.
The first question relating to the documedia revolution – the metaphysical
question – is therefore: what is the web? Here is the fundamental question of
our age, the key to understand the centuries to come, just as the understanding
of the last few centuries depended on the understanding of the industrial revo-
lution. However, with few exceptions,58 the understanding of the web is still
Ptolemaic59: the Ptolemaic web interprets itself as an information technology,
that is, as the simple digital evolution of the amnestic television of the 1950s.
The very acronym designating Web technologies is telling in this respect: ICT,
Information and Communication Technologies. In this perspective, “onlife”,
the life on the Web,60 does not mean actual life – not very virtual, but very real,
and surrounded by hoaxes – but a life in the infosphere,61 which is basically a
cognitive sphere which recalls the notion of “noosphere”, created in the early
20th century by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (1881–1955). By this term, the
French philosopher meant the sphere of human thought, “a sphere of reflec-
tion, of conscious invention, of conscious souls”.62

5.3.1 From Information to Recording

Thus, the documedia world has been considered a “virtual” world, a world
behind the world, or a representation of the world in which to live a second
imaginary life. If applied to the web, this concept interprets the documedia

58 B. Bachimont, “Between Formats and Data: When Communication Becomes Recording”,
in A. Romele, E. Terrone (ed. by), Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media, (2018),
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. See also Bernard Stiegler, e.g. B. Stiegler, La société au-
tomatique (2015), Paris: Fayard.
59 L. Floridi, The Fourth Revolution. How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality (2014),
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
60 L. Floridi (ed. by), The Onlife Manifesto. Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era (2015),
London: Springer International.
61 L. Floridi, Infosfera. Etica e filosofia nell’età dell’informazione (2009), Torino: Giappichelli.
62 P. Teilhard de Chardin, Hominization, in Id., The vision of the past (1923), New York: Harper
& Row, p. 71.
66 Ferraris

society as a liquid society,63 in which ideas meet. Instead, it is the field of a life
that – if not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” like human life outside
society according to Hobbes – certainly is more laborious, less informed and
less transparent than one would like it to be. When social networks and com-
puter services clarified that the web world was indeed the real world, the only
one that exists, it was reiterated that the web was an infosphere in which we
exchange information, neglecting the decisive fact that everything that takes
place on the web is recording rather than communication.
This is the truly decisive aspect, metaphysically speaking: the web is neither
a dream world nor a sphere of empty words; it is a docusphere, a field that,
through an unprecedented recording power, creates documents. Only once we
understand this circumstance can we talk about the web while knowing what
we are talking about (which raises the doubt, hyperbolic but not unfounded,
that so far that we have talked about the web without truly knowing what
it was – but this would not be the first time since the discovery of the West
Indies). The web, from an ontological point of view, is not a representation of
society, but rather society itself, because society is made up of social objects as
recorded acts, and recording is now increasingly taking place on the web. In
fact, the web is much more than a super-television that transports and com-
municates information, which is then passively received by the user. The web
records and archives, and while with the spoken word and the old media there
can be communication without archive (recording is lost), with the advent of
writing, as well as the web and the new media that depend on it, the recording
is preserved and there can even be archive without communication.
This is why we need a Copernican revolution to reveal the structures of so-
cial reality: instead of asking what the human and society are in themselves, let
us rather ask how they manifest themselves through technological expressive-
ness. This revolution is all the more significant in the social and anthropologi-
cal field because, unlike the natural sphere investigated by Kant, there is no
reason to postulate an essence of the human being and society that is different
from their appearance, that is, from their concrete forms of manifestation. The
web, they say,64 is a revolution: the fourth, after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud.
They also say that this is a silent revolution.65 And they are right, because it is
an underestimated and misunderstood revolution, one that occurred without
clamour.

63 Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, 2000.

64 L. Floridi, The Fourth Revolution, cit.
65 M. Bunz, The Silent Revolution. How Digitalization Transforms Knowledge, Work, Journalism
and Politics without Making Too Much Noise (2013), London: Palgrave Macmillan.
From Fountain to Moleskine 67

But here’s the point: it occurred without clamour because it uses a silent
technique, i.e. recording. It is recording, and nothing else, that gives the web
its power,66 and what I wish to do is reduce the web to the principle of record-
ing, which is also the constitutive element of society as such.67 This anthro-
pological revolution is also, and quite significantly, the fourth technological
revolution68 related to writing (the first being the invention of writing, the
second the passage from codes to books, and the third the printing press). If
(not so long ago) oblivion used to be the norm and traces were the exception,
today the opposite is true. This possibility, immanent to the nature of the web,
emerged when Internet platforms began to collect consumer data to profile
them. In this sense, the web has been considered as a sort of panopticon.69
Actually, by manifesting itself as recording, the web qualifies as the current
form of social reality, which consists precisely in a sphere of acts recorded and
defined as documentality. The web has ceased to be considered as obviously
virtual,70 and there are ongoing rearguard arguments between proponents of
the real71 or at least partly real72 character of the web. However, only by leav-
ing these academic disputes behind can we grasp the philosophical and actual
essence of the web. The web is a great recording apparatus, and from recording
it draws its power and its normative force.

5.3.2 Copernican Web

If conceived as reality and recording, the web appears as a starting point that
promises much wider results than those normally expected from the exami-
nation of a technical apparatus. So, I will now provide, in a schematic form,
the guidelines of the perspective that I am proposing: 1. the web is first of all
recording, and not just communication; it works not as a television, but as an
archive; 2. it is action and performativity rather than information, it does not
simply accumulate knowledge, but it defines a space in which social acts take
place, such as promises, commitments, orders; 3. it is real rather than virtual,

66 S. Arafat, E. Ashori, Search Foundations. Toward a Science of Technology-Mediated

Experience (2019), Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
67 M. Ferraris, Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (2009), New York: SUNY,
2012.
68 G. Roncaglia, La quarta rivoluzione. Sei lezioni sul futuro del libro (2010), Roma-Bari:
Laterza.
69 M. Andrejevic, K. Gates, “Big Data Surveillance. Introduction”, in Surveillance & Society 12,
No. 2, 2014: 185–196.
70 R. Rogers, Digital Methods (2013), Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
71 B. Latour et al., Enquête sur les modes d’existence: une anthropologie des modernes (2012),
Paris: La Découverte.
72 N. Marres, Digital Sociology (2017), Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, p. 106–115.
68 Ferraris

i.e. it is not a simple immaterial extension of social reality, but is defined as the
elective space for the construction of social reality; 4. it is mobilization rather
than emancipation, that is, it does not immediately provide liberation (as was
believed when the web took its first steps) nor is it simply an instrument of
domination, but it is rather a mobilizing apparatus, one that makes us perform
actions; 5. it is emergence rather than construction, in the sense that it is not
somebody’s deliberate project, but rather the result of many components that
have come together in a non-programmatic form; 6. finally, it is opacity and
not transparency, that is, it is not self-evident but, on the contrary, needs to be
clarified, revealing once again a strict isomorphism with the iceberg of social
reality, and in particular with its tip – i.e. capital. The documedia revolution al-
lows us to understand what would otherwise be inexplicable. As recording, the
web intervenes in the genesis of capital (it is itself the principle of capital for-
mation). Secondly, we understand why the web is at the basis of the transfor-
mations of labour, which is increasingly characterized as mobilization: indeed,
the web works as an archive that keeps track of our actions thus acquiring the
normative power of a document, which in turn causes new actions (as an ex-
ample, think of the double tick on WhatsApp: the message has been received
and read, therefore answering becomes almost obligatory). Postmodernism
dreamed of a liquid, tolerant and memory-less modernity. What has emerged,
instead, is the most powerful archive of all time, which multiplies and perfects
the power of social reality.

5.4 Article 4. Commodities Should Be Treated as Documents

The first and most obvious feature of documedia commodities is the prox-
imity between goods and documents. More precisely, commodities turn out
to be subordinate to documents: they are manufactured by machines based
on programs that have the same physical interface as that used to produce
documents (a screen and/or a keyboard).73 The shift from commodities
to documents is fraught with consequences because it involves a reduction in
the difference between manual work and intellectual work, as well as between
working time and living time. Both in labour and in the mobilization that sur-
rounds it and subsumes it, there is a single form of mediation: the keyboard or
screen of a computer or smartphone. From the policeman giving a fine to the
inspector checking our train ticket (without even looking at it, in most cases,
because a reader deciphers its barcode), from the music composer to the bu-
reaucrat, from the child making a drawing to the teenager texting their friends:
in all these cases there is only one intermediation, and the fundamental limb

73 M. Carpo, The Second Digital Turn (2017), Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
From Fountain to Moleskine 69

is the hand (some say that Siri will change things in this respect, but I am not
so sure).
This process can be divided into three functions: 1. documentation, i.e. the
growth of information on traditional commodities (think of the production
tracing processes); 2. intermediation, i.e. the fact that the web takes the place
of traditional mediation not only in the economy, but also in politics and so-
cial relations. Indeed, a service economy (think of the activities carried out by
telephone companies or online stores such as Amazon) does not consist in
producing artifacts, but in generating and circulating documents relating to
the services offered and to their users; 3. production through 3D printing, by
running programs formulated the same way as documents (as a result of which
the difference between design and production disappears, from a conceptual
point of view). Let’s examine these three functions in more detail.

5.4.1 Documentation
First of all, the documentation is passive, so that the document-commodity is
a documented commodity: for example, the type of fruit, its degree of ripeness,
its shelf life, its sugar content. This is the cognitive advantage of the hyper-
documentation of products, which is a growing phenomenon. Before, the only
information available used to be the price: condensing a large amount of infor-
mation into the single summary of the price thus appears to be a largely inad-
equate solution. To illustrate the characteristics of documentation, I propose
five paradigmatic cases.
1. Contractual art. The first example is precisely the contractual art which
fully reveals how prophetic it was with respect to the rest of society. When
the production of objects is automated (which, in the case of painting,
happened almost two centuries ahead of industry), the character of art is
institutional, which is not so much in the production of an object (this
is essential, but, in fact, does not necessarily have to be done by hand by
the artist, or expressly), but rather the implementation of the contract
about the definition and enjoyment of the artwork underlying the rela-
tionship between producer and user.
2. Logos. The second, in line with contractual art, is quite obviously the logo,
criticized for reasons that are largely inscrutable74 or, better, purely ideo-
logical. Indeed, despite being sometimes unattractive from the aesthetic
point of view (but as we have seen this is a continuation of the process

74 N. Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Knopf Canada, Picador, 1999. The text
has been widely discussed, but it has not been considered that logos and brands are prin-
ciples of responsibility and, therefore, liability.
70 Ferraris

of brandification, i.e. one of the fundamental strategies of twentieth-cen-

tury art), the logo is the essence of the documentation of the commodi-
ties. The logo makes a product immediately recognizable and certifies
its authenticity performing the same function (and exposing itself to the
same possibilities of counterfeiting) as the signature in a document. We
must therefore bless the fact of being a civilization linked to the logo and
to iconodulism, because otherwise innumerable information on our past
would have disappeared: things like the name of a Babylonian potter, of
an Egyptian pharaoh and, more recently, the “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic
“in the portrait of the Arnolfini couple. The denominations of controlled
origin on food products, nutritional information, information on the
fabric composition and washing instructions all mean that traditionally
anonymous products (a bottle of wine, a jumper) are today full of signa-
tures, dates and data.
3. BIM. The third, less obvious, is BIM (Building Information Modeling),
which offers a document perspective on buildings, evaluating them not
only according to the three spatial dimensions, but also through a fourth
temporal dimension (the time needed to realize them) and a fifth finan-
cial dimension (the cost of building and, in perspective, of maintenance).75
In addition to these spatiotemporal and financial relations, BIM deals
with the analysis of the light, the geographic information, and the com-
ponents of the buildings: in other words, it reduces the substance to a
bundle of properties much like what Locke did in metaphysics. In the
latter context, the reduction was improper, because it turned an episte-
mological character into an ontological property of the objects, but in
the case of the social ontology and its objects the reduction is perfectly
legitimate. Houses, hopefully, are not documents, but there is no doubt
that documents are needed to make decent homes.76
4. Concept Stores. The fourth is about concept stores. These do not sell ob-
jects (which are deliberately heterogeneous: think of Muji, where one can
find beds, suitcases, shirts, pens, biscuits …), but rather lifestyles, much
like travel sites. What is characteristic of a concept store, however, is that
it does not even sell concepts, but rather behavioural patterns or, if you
prefer, stories. Which is to say that, even in this case, the alternative to the
object is not the concept, but an intermediate term: the document.

75 M. Carpo, The Second Digital Turn (2017), Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
76 A. Armando, G. Durbiano, Teoria del progetto architettonico. Dai disegni agli effetti (2017),
Roma: Carocci.
From Fountain to Moleskine 71

5. Digital Stores. Fifth and last example. The transformation of commodi-

ties into documents is finally evident in digital stores, where the interac-
tion, so to speak, between what is in the text (the document) and what
is outside the text (a bottle of wine, a cheese, a dress) reaches previously
unimaginable levels. Buying food online (receiving document informa-
tion about its composition, origin, expiration), using simulations to see
if the clothes we are about order online will fit and if the furniture in
the online catalogue matches our home means conferring ever greater
importance to the map rather than the territory. The territory, i.e. the use
value, does not change: wine and ham, jeans and books do not change.
But the map, i.e. the exchange value, extends and becomes more articu-
lated, becoming more and more similar to the 1:1 representation of the
empire in Borges’ short story.

5.4.2 Intermediation
There is a second area in which the documentation of goods becomes central:
that of intermediation. Traditional intermediations were not documents, but
basilicas, courts, travel agencies, parliaments or radiotaxis. The current inter-
mediations (which for incomprehensible reasons are often interpreted as dis-
intermediations) are archives intended for the management of documents (if
you prefer to call them “data management platforms”, you can, but it would be
less informative). Since the documents concern the whole sphere of social ob-
jects, their intermediation and management take place not only in the sphere
of the economy (where, as we shall see, the single company gives way to the
market), but everywhere. Partitocracy gives way to populism (more efficient,
but from an electoral point of view, not in terms of government). War gives
way to terrorism, whereby an activity that was previously managed by profes-
sional groups with managerial criteria is now entrusted to the market run by
freelancers recruited in ways similar to Uber drivers. Real communities give
way to media communities, also in the context of an improvement in living
conditions that it would be moralistic to condemn: why argue with the neigh-
bour when you can do so with an antipodean? Why drink cheap champagne in
a dodgy bar when there are so many people to meet on dating sites?
We are dealing with an active documentation, in which we witness the
creation of market-companies that allow for the circulation of commodities –
which explains, why now that almost everything is done by machines, we still
do not work fifteen hours a week. The commodities must move, and either we
go to the goods (as was done traditionally) or the goods come to us (as hap-
pens in the documedia world). But for the goods to come to us, it is necessary
72 Ferraris

for documents to ensure their transfer. And this is where the new forms of
intermediation come in: Upwork for work, Bitcoin for money, Amazon for
goods, Google for knowledge, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the social
world. Each of these intermediations replaces a previous one: Amazon instead
of Walmart, Airbnb instead of Hilton, Uber instead of Hertz. And each of these
intermediations transfers a relatively large part of the work to those who re-
ceive the services, which explains why – without knowing it, and without any-
body bothering to tell us – we now work fifteen hours a day.
The commodity thus manifests its own humanity. Obviously the other side
is also valid, namely that the humanization of the commodity has its counter-
part in the commodification of the human. But, really, I cannot understand
what is so surprising about this. The word “value” was notoriously as marvel-
lous as “sense” for Hegel, since it simultaneously indicates an unconditional
moral principle (the non-negotiable value of life, for example) and the econom-
ic principle of exchange value. These two apparently contradictory meanings
are actually coherent with each other, and have a common root: documental-
ity as the origin of both social objects and moral intentionality.
What is taking place is a documentation of the world of life: the social
world, and the documents that make up its main structure, converge with the
media world, creating a situation in which recording (the traditional sphere
of bureaucracy, economy, capital) and communication (the sphere of mass
media and individualized social networks) come to constitute a single reality.
Former industrial plants are reborn as warehouses and malls are replaced by
Amazon. This is how Amazon answers the question: how do commodities get
to people’s homes? Amazon produces documents, managing and acquiring a
gigantic flow of data that allow it to perfect its algorithms, thereby obtaining
a cognitive surplus value. The latter is precisely the documedia surplus value,
i.e. the difference between the value of the data provided by the platforms
to the users and the value (much higher, because secret and individualized)
of the data that users provide to the platforms.

5.4.3 Production
The third form of the documentation of commodities, which perfects the
previous ones, is 3D production, which as I said assimilates the production
of objects to the writing of documents. On the one hand, we have a growth
of documediality: if in the sphere of information and intermediation the doc-
ument refers to pre-existing objects or agents, here it is the document itself
that is productive not only in the context of social reality (as traditionally oc-
curs), but also in the production of artifacts. This transformation is also an
epochal turning point in the history of the document. The first documents
were oral, i.e. one-dimensional (oaths, promises); then they became written,
From Fountain to Moleskine 73

i.e. two-dimensional. 3D printing is the completion of a story that began in

Plato’s Timaeus, in which the demiurge builds the world with ideas. The mode
of production of commodities will become in all respects compatible with that
of the production of documents.
Ideally, making a home will be tantamount to designing it.77 This circum-
stance – which, once again, nullifies the difference between intellectual work
and manual labour – should not be underestimated. 3D production no longer
has any of the characteristics of classical production, since it does not require
any physical effort that exceeds that of design. From this point of view, produc-
ing a chair with a 3D printer is no different from writing an article or from the
countless activities of cutting, pasting and reusing that underlie the expres-
sive mobilization on the web. Therefore, there is no way to draw a difference
between the production of the chair and that of an article or a karaoke ses-
sion in terms of fatigue or of human action on nature. Even expertise, already
circumvented by industrial production, becomes largely superfluous. In other
words, production, at every level, becomes marginal, and the central role goes
to processes of living labour related to what I have characterized elsewhere
as “responsiveness”. It is not complicated to make a 3D figurine: the compli-
cated thing is to generate the need for such an artifact, the elaboration of the
Witz which consists in sending it to a senior official who is about to retire and
who is therefore representing somewhere in his own conscience a similar
“umarell” (i.e. the petulant pensioner who spends his time looking at construc-
tion sites), etc.
But there is a further consequence, which is fundamental to the present dis-
course. This circumstance is that 3D production recovers a crucial feature of
document production: namely individuality, which can go as far as to the detail,
and to idiomatic aspects such as the signature placed at the bottom. It is very
easy to create complex figures, full of baroque folds. The era of standardiza-
tion is being left behind: we are entering that of singularity. Individualization
will not generally correspond to the privatization of the means of production.
It is not that everyone will stay at home printing objects: indeed, it is prob-
able that just as today not everyone has a 2D printer at home, not everyone
will have a 3D printer (which will be found in print centres: something that
is now expressed with the concept of fab-lab). However, the mode of produc-
tion of commodities will become completely compatible with the production
of documents. In terms of social repercussions, the individualization of goods
offers prospects for an industry oriented to customer care and more generally
to the creation of innovative forms of services, also in consideration of the

77 M. Carpo, L’architettura dell’età della stampa (1998), Milano: Jaca Book.
74 Ferraris

changed social structure that generates the need of services once provided by
the family organization.

5.5 Article 5. Documents Are the New Commodity

Now we are witnessing an even more significant transition. So far we have
looked at the documentation of traditional goods, which are moved or gener-
ated by documents. But there is a second phase, where documents become
the fundamental commodity. This is the decisive change brought about by the
ongoing revolution, one that allows us to glimpse, so to speak, the true face of
the documedia capital. In the case of 3D printing, documents become produc-
ers of goods. But the fundamental characteristic of the documedia revolution
lies in having transformed, for the first time in the history of the world, every
kind of document (from maps to photographs, from messages to likes) in a
commodity, actual or potential. And note that here the document that really
matters is not the explicit one accessed by those who surf the web in search of
information or services, but that (indeed, those) that the mobilized leaves as a
trace of their browsing, often without being aware of doing so.

5.5.1 “Anything Can Be a Document”

Now that everything – from heartbeats to religious practices – is recorded and
archived, and therefore everything can be a document (as predicted by its
theoreticians),78 it turns out that what we produce through our interactions
on the web are not just big data, but rich data79: data that are infinitely more
detailed than those provided by money. Traditional currency informs us only
about its value; electronic money informs us only of a chain of transactions
and purchases. Instead, rich data give us information about the inner lives of
the people and, in addition to that, they can perform the traditional functions
of money: measuring value (of which the price is a much more approximate
synthesis than an aggregate of data); acting as a medium of exchange (I can
exchange data against goods or services, or, if I wish, against money); and pro-
viding a value basis (there is no capital more powerful than the documedia
one). The large corporations that control the servers destined to the collec-
tion of rich data therefore, in addition to a big financial capital, have a more
detailed capital than money: one that is more individual, humanistic (capable
of idiographic and potentially analogue knowledge), and capable of feedback
and self-correction.

78 S. Briet, Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (1951), Paris: Édit.

79 V. Mayer-Schönberger, T. Ramge, Reinventare il capitalismo nell’era dei big data (2018), tr.
it. Milano: Egea 2018.
From Fountain to Moleskine 75

These data, in other words, do not speak only of themselves (often boast-
ing), as happens in financial capital, but (if collected and interpreted prop-
erly), they tell the lives of billions of people (those who produced them) with
a quantitative extension that can turn into qualitative precision, to the point
of knowing individuals better and more than they know themselves. So, if
industrial capital produced goods through machines and labour, and if finan-
cial capital produced money through money (or at least hoped to do so), the
documedia capital produces money through the data that each of us gener-
ates on the web. What is more important, however, is that these data are not
constructed, but emerge as a result of our activity on the web. Google cannot
print data like the Bank of America can print dollars; unless it wants to pro-
duce fake data, it can only collect them by recording our mobilization, which
is therefore the source of the wealth of GAFAM.

5.5.2 Docuworld
A documedia market is a huge library, bearing knowledge of the individual.
Documedia platforms store the flow of multidimensional information. The
documedia market, which not coincidentally reduces the company to an
internet intermediation, is particularly developed in the field of travel, car
sharing, and electronics. Amazon (which is a market rather than a company,
if we think about it, or rather is a company that proposes itself as a market),
documedializes everything from books to shoes. There is a decentralization
of decisions, typical of the market, but at the same time (and this is the prob-
lem to be solved through the socialization of documedia profits)80 there is a
centralization of profits, typical of the company. If companies want to survive,
they must introduce new market elements: in particular horizontality. It is im-
portant to note a circumstance that plays a key role in the transformation of
labour: it is rightly observed that the passage from goods to documents shifts
the decision-making power from managers to rich data flows coupled with
machine learning systems; but in addition to the transformation of corporate
governance, it should not be underestimated that the major transformations
will concern the very nature of companies.
Not only will traditional commodities face the processes of documedializa-
tion that I have just described, but companies will have to incorporate systems
of document collection and management that reduce the gap (and degree of
dependence) between traditional businesses and GAFAM. The so-called big

80 Cf. M. Ferraris, “Web è comunismo realizzato, ma resta lo sfruttamento: ecco l’era

documediale”, on agendadigitale.eu, https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/
ferraris-web-e-comunismo-realizzato-ma-resta-lo-sfruttamento-ecco-lera-documediale/.
76 Ferraris

data should be more correctly called big documents, because they do not simply
account for states of things, but produce events, in that they have a performa-
tive nature. Some have proposed the term “datafication” to define the ongo-
ing phenomenon,81 but it seems more appropriate to speak of “documents”, as
the documedia turn has produced precisely a process of documentation. More
documents are produced than ever before, and what was previously not docu-
mentable is now documented. But what is a document? “Document” trans-
lates the Latin documentum, from doceo, meaning “what shows or represents
a fact”. This description seems to fit all three spheres in which it is customary
to speak of documents: the historical one, where “document” designates all
that appears relevant for the reconstruction of the past; the informative one,
where the term includes everything that conveys an information, more or less
in the sense in which “.doc” is the format of Microsoft Word files; and the legal
one, where it indicates what has legal value. Intuitively, it is this third sense,
which is also the oldest and most traditional, that appears to be most specific.
The other two values, the historical and the informative, derive from the juridi-
cal one – so historians say. Here “juridical” is to be understood, at least in my
theory, in an extensive sense, which pertains to the overall process of inscrip-
tion of all that is socially relevant, from economics to religion.
If this is the prevailing meaning in the definition of “document”, be it public
or private, prescriptive (as a law) or descriptive (such as a passport, driving
license, diploma), then one should integrate and specify the description of
document as a “representation of a fact” with that of document as “record-
ing of an act”. Acts here are things like ordering, promising, betting, and so
forth. In many cases they are linguistic, but not always (I can order something
with a wave of the hand, I can greet with a nod, etc.). Documents record these
acts, and that is why they matter: the identity card proves that I am me, my
grandfather’s will justifies the validity of a given inheritance, the credit card re-
ceipt certifies that I have paid. From the perspective I am proposing, the docu-
ment must be conceived not as something given once and for all, constituting
a stable class of objects, but rather as the reification of social acts which, in
turn, change in the course of history and geography. The constant, here, is not
offered by the type of acts or by the resulting documents, but by the fact that
without acts and without inscriptions a society is not conceivable. So, not all
inscriptions are documents, but all inscriptions, under certain conditions and
provided a certain social power, can become such.

81 V. Mayer-Schönberger, K. Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live,
Work, and Think (2013), Boston: Eamon Dolan.
From Fountain to Moleskine 77

5.5.3 Kinds of Documents

In “Documentality: Why it is necessary to leave traces”, I have distinguished
between weak documents, as recordings of facts, and strong documents, as
recordings of acts and therefore as construction of social objects.82 In the light
of the automatisms produced by the documedia revolution it is now better to
distinguish also between formal and informal documents. Let’s examine these
two partitions.
1. Strong documents and weak documents. It is commonly said that the doc-
ument is a representation, but it is not clear what is meant by this. It would
seem that, in the proper sense, the document attests to something, which is
to say that it echoes the act that has issued the document. Otherwise it would
be difficult to explain in what sense my identity card represents me, or my
Italian citizenship, or the rather elusive thing that is my identity. Attestation
is therefore the fundamental activity of documentation, and – in line with the
law “Object = Recorded Act” – it will not be surprising that the attestation is
properly the recording of an act. The attestation exists over time, by virtue of
the persistence of its physical counterpart, and has social value, by virtue
of the provisions of the subjects involved.
Thus, the strong document is the recording of an act, that is, an attestation
that persists over time and has social value; the weak one is the recording of a
fact. The recording of a fact can also be unintentional, it can be simply a trace
found by the scientific police, an exhibit, the symptom of a disease in a medi-
cal record – which, in turn, is a document in the weak sense, but is intentional.
In this context, the document in the strong sense is mainly connected with
writing, while the document in the weak sense can be – typically, in the case
of traces and exhibits – connected with arche-writing (though it is not neces-
sarily so, because a clinical record is at least partly a very traditional type of
writing).
Ontologically, between the document in the strong sense and the document
in the weak sense there is a significant difference, since the first is precisely an
act and the second a piece of evidence, which can possibly be used in an act,
but not always (indeed, almost never) is. Reciprocally, it can happen that acts
can serve as evidence83: I can use the register of a graduation session in which I
participated to prove in court that I did not commit a murder that took place at
the same time as the graduation session. But, characteristically, being attesta-
tions, documents can hardly function as evidence of what they attest without

82 M. Ferraris, Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (2009), New York: SUNY,
2012.
83 V. Crescenzi, La rappresentazione dell’evento giuridico, cit., p. 19.
78 Ferraris

falling into a circular reasoning. I can show my medical degree to testify that
I am not an impostor, but what makes it a proof is the fact that it is valid, so
much so that if its validity is questioned, for example in court, it would be
necessary to produce supporting evidence. In other words, a document cannot
itself prove its validity.84
Differentiated by these peculiarities, the document in the strong sense and
the document in the weak sense are nevertheless united by the circumstance
of being valid only in a context. I can use a strong medieval document, for ex-
ample a will, as a weak document, for example as an attestation of a testator’s
assets in a local history article. The strong document, which has expired in its
legal function, finds a new topicality as a weak document valid in historiogra-
phy. In both cases, however, there must be an assembly (at least two people)
willing to consider the document as such. This is even more true of uninten-
tional documents, such as traces and exhibits, which do not have a document
value per se, but acquire it within a specific legal, technical, or political context.
The latter can also intervene to make the trace evident, for example with traces
of DNA or carbon 14, which are not at all visible to the naked eye.
2. Formal documents and informal documents. The documedia revolution
leads us to identify an intermediate sphere, which I propose to call “informal
documents”. These are the documents that are produced on social media: they
are not unintentional like weak documents but they are not deliberately aimed
at the construction of social objects either, as happens in the case of strong
documents. It is difficult to make predictions, but it is likely that, since the dif-
ference between formal documents and informal documents does not lie in
the document, but in the issuing authority, there will be a progressive canon-
ization of informal documents, following the process by which the cell phone
number has progressively become an identification system with functions
similar to those of the signature.

5.5.4 The Continuation of Finance by Other Means

Documentation is the extension of the financial paradigm, a continuation
(but at the same time the transformation) of finance by other means, in the

84 And the self-certifications offered by a document appeal to idiomatic characters, such

as the watermark and the like. These idiomatic characters, typically, require other docu-
ments or at least practices that attest to their validity. This really feels like an infinite
regress (the validity of a document requires a valid document attesting to it), but the
regress is stopped by practical limits. The case of identity is even more complex, because
in general a court is interested in finding out who is the person who has certain charac-
teristics (those, for example, of having performed certain actions) or if a given person has
certain characteristics (such as their nationality or kinship relations).
From Fountain to Moleskine 79

same sense in which Clausewitz defined war as a continuation of politics by

other means. The document becomes the fundamental commodity, because
it generates the highest capital there is: human capital. Why is the document
the fundamental commodity? Because of the nature of capitalization. On a
financial level, the document takes the place of money, precisely because it
is enormously more detailed. Ultimately, bitcoin is the acknowledgement
of this transition from money to document. This explains why the collection of
documents is so important: the document, in fact, is both the commodity and
the money. And it comes with unprecedented knowledge of the individual.
The function of money is dual: to contain and maintain value on the one hand,
and to condense information about our preferences in the form of price, track-
ing the value of a good over time on the other. Well, this second function is
fulfilled in a much more efficient way by the documedia capital than by the
money capital.
Conversely, now that the price is no longer the relevant information, shops
that supply goods at very low prices (Flying Tiger, etc.) are multiplying, but
with a variety and inventiveness that originate from a documedia knowledge
of the market (leave an object for a month, see how it goes, then improve it
or replace it). Also in terms of money management, traditional banks cannot
compete with PayPal and ApplePay. And consider the fintech solutions offer-
ing peer-to-peer loans, with a platform that facilitates the meeting between
supply and demand (thousands have been opened up in China). In light of this
transformation, financial capital turns out to be a phase, soon obsolete, of the
more general phenomenon of capital as absolute documediality.
How aware are we of this change? In 2013, Thomas Piketty85 still saw the
development of financial capital as the destiny of capital in the 21st century,
based on the assumption that money earns more than any other commodity
and finance is a space for the free play of human imagination, a sphere of pure
construction that enhances the allegedly hyper-dynamic and fluid character of
the social world. This idea, however, overlooks the fact that data can now make
much more money than money, constituting itself as a hyper-informative su-
per-money. There is a generalized recording that gives life to a “docusphere”
in which the recordings blow up all the traditional distinctions and activities
that characterize capital, labour, and knowledge. Nothing is as before, and
this change has to be acknowledged and understood. But to understand the
scope of this transformation, it is worth considering that the power developed
by the web is nothing more than the strengthening of a very ancient power,

85 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Cambridge (MA): Harvard University
Press, 2014.
80 Ferraris

immanent to recording, of which we can find the testimonies at the origin of

the hominization.
Documents, which are the basis for the construction of social reality (there
is no society without memories, archives, money) are now produced, thanks
to new technologies – which are characterized by an unprecedented archi-
val power, much more than a communication power – in largely automatic
forms; their production is the prevalent, voluntary and involuntary activity
of present-day humanity (a service economy is defined by documents: even
travel becomes a “travel package”). Also, it underlies the para-working and
non-working activities that nevertheless produce profit, which take place on
social networks; through processes such as the creation of bitcoins, the docu-
ments take on prerogatives traditionally belonging to the States. More gener-
ally, the web successfully promises to become a form of universal, alternative
and competitive intermediation as opposed to traditional industry and to the
classic ways of production, labour and business. This universal and distributed
mediation cannot be described as an individual or a space: it is a process rather
than a thing, it is a record rather than an archive.
The boom of recording blows up all traditional distinctions and productive
characterizations. Just as computers can basically do everything, technically,
so recording allows for the conversion of everything into everything: commod-
ities become documents, documents become commodities, and the typical ac-
tivities disappear (we pay fines at the tobacconist’s, Amazon becomes a bank,
Google a library and a travel agency, the iWatch is a diagnostic centre and so
on). This is therefore the new capital we are faced with. What is Amazon’s
core business? The boom of recording blurs the very notion of core business
in capital, labour and knowledge, and this comes from the same reason why
the computer is a universal machine that can replace all other machines, rep-
resenting the essence of technology as recording. If it has fully expressed its
essence, capital no longer needs specific realizations: it can skip any form of
determined intermediation and any form of core business to become a univer-
sal intermediation.

5.6 Article 6. Creactivity Solves the Mystery of the Commodity

Marx wrote that the commodity, in its exchange value, is a relationship between
people that hides in a thing, and this concealment constitutes precisely the
mystery of the commodity. Well, this mystery is solved by the production mode
of the documedia age. The commodity, just like a document, is the recording of
a social act that takes place between at least two people (or between a person
and a delegated machine) and that has the characteristic of being recorded
somewhere. The delegated machines can also be two, as in the online stock
From Fountain to Moleskine 81

exchange. Which shows that there can be a social object even in the complete
absence of intentionality, provided that there are records and algorithms able
to deal with it: the algorithm that buys or sells shares has no form of awareness
of its work, and yet its operations are effective, while if the human agents at a
stock exchange were aware and intentional, but no transactions were tracked,
then the whole operation would be pointless. It follows that the commod-
ity’s document-becoming is not a deviation, a spiritualization or a cognitive
transformation, but simply the revelation of its essence. From the docume-
dia perspective, commodities (and, more clearly, spectacles) are revealed as
“sensible-supersensible (sinnlich übersinnliche) or social things”,86 where the
relationship between things is only a social relationship between people,87
and things manifest themselves as documents (Debord complains that the
spectacle can easily be managed in a monopolistic form by bureaucrats,88 thus
recognizing its document nature).

5.6.1 A Relation of People

What takes place on the web, unlike in the factory, is clearly a relationship
between people and, above all, a relationship in which people are at the
centre, as users or as producers. This is already evident in what is formally
recognized as labour. As mentioned, the fundamental operation of a service
economy does not consist in producing artifacts, but in generating and cir-
culating documents relating to the services offered. From this point of view,
all the insistence on the service economy is nothing but a misunderstanding
of the fact that in many cases we are dealing with a production of documents,
that is, informative artifacts, sometimes endowed with deontic power. This is
the case with insurance companies and banks, erroneously defined as belong-
ing to the service sector. And today the phenomenon is growing: think of on-
line sales, transport (Uber’s business lies in making contracts), and the cultural
industry, which is the manufacture of informative artifacts: film, TV, audio, etc.
Teaching itself, which is considered industry, is partly the manufacture of in-
formative artifacts (since it is a cultural industry), and partly the production of
capabilities.

86 K. Marx, The Value-Form. Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital, Volume 1, 1867,
in Capital and Class, No.4 Spring 1978, pp.130–150, available at https://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1867-c1/appendix.htm.
87 “It is only the definite social relation of people (der Menschen) itself which here [in the
commodity] takes on for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation of things.”. K. Marx,
The Value Form (1867–1894), cit.
88 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), Black & Red, 1977, § 64; on how bureaucrats took
power after the October revolution, cf. § 104.
82 Ferraris

While the production of artefacts in a factory brings the object to the fore,
data collection or exchanges on social media (which in turn produce further
data) bring to the fore the relationship between people. The latter is an ex-
plicit relationship in the productive space that has taken the place of factories,
namely social media. With what appears to be the end of alienation, people’s
activity often consists not in the production of objects, but in the creation of
documents that express thoughts and preferences, all within a relationship
that takes place on social media. This is obviously a prolongation of the classic
exchange of opinions and daily chat, except that it can last longer, not being
incompatible with work activities that most often – again – consist of the pro-
duction of documents (unlike the age of production, which took place in very
bad communicative conditions). Above all, unlike the social exchanges of the
past, it leaves traces, i.e. it is configured as a production of documents. From
this point of view, the difference between working time and living time is lost.
What we produce as workers, and what we produce as generic human beings,
is made of the same stuff: of documents.
And even when the relationship between people is less evident, as in the
case of data collection caused by any of our web activities other than those
involving a relationship between people (for example, reading a newsletter,
browsing a catalogue, making a purchase), the fact remains that at the centre
of the process there isn’t the production of an object, but the subjects, their
habits, their preferences, their consumer habits. This is a Copernican revolu-
tion, in which the fundamental concern of the market no longer consists in the
production of objects (which has become unproblematic and resolvable with
processes that, as in 3D printing, can produce individualized products), but
the knowledge of subjects, and more precisely knowledge of the individual.
In both cases, the fundamental commodity is not the industrial product, but
the document generated by the exchange of data, by the need for distribu-
tion, or by the acquisition of data. The latter, indeed, is the main activity: the
contemporary counterpart to the production of commodities in the industrial
economy.

5.6.2 Learning from Duchamp

And so we’ve come to the end. After all, the story we have told is very simple.
If social objects respond to the rule “Object = Recorded Act”, it is not surpris-
ing that the relationships between social actors change every time a new tech-
nical recording apparatus appears. In the seventeenth century, experimental
science (with its machines) challenged philosophy, which then, mistakenly,
progressively moved away from nature. In the nineteenth century, photogra-
phy challenged painting, which reacted better than philosophy, placing itself
From Fountain to Moleskine 83

at the centre of the market and social attention. In the twenty-first century,
the documedia revolution is not only undermining the traditional forms of
economic mediation and political representation, but also forces us to rethink
the very methods of production, distribution and consumption of goods. And
what was once only a problem for artists has now become a problem for ev-
eryone. Since artists seem to have solved it better than philosophers (because,
unlike the latter, they could not fall back on teaching), philosophers should
learn from artists – not concepts (artists have never been particularly brilliant
at those) but contracts, i.e. ways to renegotiate relations with the world. And
they should try to share them with those who are neither philosophers nor art-
ists, but who in some way are forced to become both in the face of the impera-
tives of the documedia revolution. The philosophy of art would finally help
everyone, and I hope the present essay has offered a small contribution in this
direction.

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