Card produced by Musée D’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva documenting Elaine Sturtevant’s work from the collection. Beuys La Rivoluzione siamo noi, 1988–1992, Tirage offset couleur, 97.8 × 53.5 cm, éd. 20/21.

The American artist Sturtevant is best known for her repetitions of the works of other artists, which she recreated manually from memory after having seen a piece that intrigued her. These can immediately be identified with the original, but they are not copies. The artists with whose work she engaged include her contemporaries in American Pop—Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann – as well as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella, Félix González-Torres, Keith Haring and Anselm Kiefer, among others. Her aim was not to achieve an exact replica, but rather to address notions of authorship, authenticity and originality that would later come to the fore in our own digital age, characterised by the endless circulation and recombination of images.

Created by French artist Philippe Thomas, the communication agency called readymades belong to everyone®, for its American version inaugurated in 1987 in New York, and les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde®, for its French version, is a company behind which the artist disappeared. MAMCO owns the whole agency, which closed in 1995. This book is the first comprehensive study of this work which challenged the traditional role and function of the artist. With readymades belong to eveyone®, the collector or the institution themselves sign the works and become the authors of the works. The book proposes also the last (and unpublished) interview by Philippe Thomas which enables to understand the deep coherence of his entire work. Textes de Paul Bernard, Émeline Jaret, Philippe Thomas, Stéphane Wargnier.