Johan & Levi republishes Migliorini's 'Lo scolabottiglie di Duchamp'

Johan & Levi has republished Ermanno Migliorini's 1970 book 'Lo scolabottiglie di Duchamp', originally released by Edizioni d'arte Il Fiorino di Firenze. The new edition includes a preface by Roberto Paolo Malaspina, an art historian and PhD candidate in aesthetics at the University of Milan and member of the ERC AN-ICON project led by Andrea Pinotti. The book examines Marcel Duchamp's readymade 'Bottle Rack' as a case study for questioning how artistic value is determined. Migliorini applies ethical philosophy, particularly G.E. Moore's 'Principia Ethica' (1903), to argue that the artistic value of a readymade is intuitively evident rather than logically deducible. The volume also explores the relationship between art and criticism, describing a 'choreography' where Minimalist and Conceptual art challenge traditional critical tools, forcing tautological responses. Malaspina notes the book's relevance to contemporary debates on who decides what art is, citing recent scholarship like Elena Filipovic's 'The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp' and the ongoing exhibition 'Marcel Duchamp and the Lure of the Copy' at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The interview was conducted by Davide Dal Sasso, a researcher at Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca.