Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, the central figure in the lesson is Marcel Duchamp. This essay will argue that the Duchampian readymade offered artists a second, far less readily identifiable legacy, in which the lesson to be learned was not the irrelevance of beauty but rather its ubiquity. The main champion of this antithetical legacy is John Cage, who proposed that what made Robert Rauschenberg’s work so significant was that it demonstrated that “[b]eauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” This essay pursues the implications of Cage’s perspective on Rauschenberg by arguing for a different conception of aesthetic experience, one that can be understood as “uncritical” or “affirmative.” Where the critical avant-garde is distinguished by its institutionality at the service of critical cognition, the affirmative avant-garde, precisely because it rejects institutionality, is utterly incapable of critical cognition.

中文翻译：

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美之泉（杜尚的其他教训）

可以说，前卫的伟大教训是美的无关紧要，而且，从所有方面来看，该教训的中心人物是马塞尔·杜尚（Marcel Duchamp）。本文将论证说，杜尚制的现成作品为艺术家提供了第二个，远不那么容易辨认的遗产，其中要汲取的教训不是美的无关紧要，而是美的无处不在。这一对立遗产的主要拥护者是约翰·凯奇（John Cage），他提出让罗伯特·劳森伯格（Robert Rauschenberg）的作品如此重要的原因是，它表明“无论我们在哪里寻找麻烦，美容都已步履维艰。” 本文通过论证审美体验的不同概念，可以理解为凯奇关于劳森伯格的观点的含义，可以将其理解为“非批判的”或“肯定的”。