Emeline Jaret

Emeline Jaret talks about French artist Philippe Thomas (1951–1995) and about readymades belong to everyone®, an agency he created in 1987 as a conduit by which collectors became authors of the artworks they acquired. The exhibition Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 shows his work in the section AUTORETROSPECTIVE.

Philippe Thomas foresaw many of the crucial questions raised by present artistic debates and their language: the function of the audience, the conception of the exhibition as artwork, the de-personalization of the author, the scattering of artistic codes in media of mass communication, the appropriation of advertising and marketing strategies, the slippage between reality and fiction. He rewrote the artist-work-viewer relationship in a performative guise, calling into question the history of art, and art itself.