This is a collection of eight essays around a central thesis with implications for the history of the avant-gardes. Although Duchamp's readymades broke with all previously known styles, the author here observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgement that replaced the classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art". The author employs this shift in a re-reading of Kant's "Critique of Judgement" that aims to reveal the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism.