Whiteness as Property and Found Object Art: Collecting and Canonizing Marcel Duchamp

This chapter delineates the process by which a personal collection becomes part of a permanent archive within an established museum. It examines the donation by Walter and Louise Arensberg of Marcel Duchamp's works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as its case study. The correspondence between patron, artist, and museum reveals how a materialist understanding of museum donations is required to critique the composition of artistic value, the canon, and narratives of innovation. In examining Duchamp's Fountain (a urinal), the concept of found object art and his patron's historical milieu are especially relevant because in the early twentieth-century segregation was present in all US sectors and visualized in the space of private and public fountains and restrooms. The chapter examines how the work of Noah Purifoy offers methods to critically reexamine the politics of found object art.