Completing Gombrich's Move after Duchamp - Toward a Relational Geometry of Art

Twentieth-century aesthetics performed two reductions — Duchamp removed the object as the source of art, Gombrich removed “Art” as a metaphysical category — but left the producer untouched as a privileged locus. Once the producer is also removed, art has nowhere left to reside except in the observer’s experience. What remains is not a substance or a property but an event: non-instrumental interpretive engagement, structurally identical to play, triggered by stimuli but constituted entirely in the stance of the observer. Whether this reframing changes anything about practice depends on whether institutions — galleries, academies, criticism — can tolerate a definition that makes their gatekeeping function visible.