During the 1960s, artists from Alan Kaprow and Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol and Richard Serra stopped making "art" as it has been thought of since the Renaissance. They staged performances that mixed everyday life with theater and in yet other, often ironic, ways challenged the system of marketing, display, and aesthetic discourse that ascribes exceptional monetary as well as cultural value to paintings and sculpture. Work Ethic, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, brings together a cross section of such radical...

How did you get the concept for Part Object Part Sculpture?

I remain fascinated by the tricky nature of Duchamp's readymades--objects transformed into art, but not quite. They always retain their original identity or function. This is why many people refer to Fountain in a casual way as "the urinal." For me this is an acknowledgment that the work is part art, part not--part object, part sculpture.

What is new about your interpretation of Duchamp?

I insist that we see the readymades produced in the 1960s as quite different from the readymades that...