DHC/ART in collaboration with the Interuniversity Doctoral Art History Program host Thierry de Duve who will offer a talk and visual presentation concerning how and why certain things can be called art. Through a word for word analysis of the sentence "Ceci est de l'art", Thierry De Duve will outline a theory for considering contemporary art.

Thierry de Duve is a professor of aesthetics and art history in the Fine Arts Department at Université Lille III. His research work and writing are focused to a reinterpretation of modernism related to Marcel Duchamp's readymade and its implications for aesthetics. He is the author of a number of books including Look, 100 Years of Contemporary Art (2001), Kant after Duchamp (1998), Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (1996), Pictorial Nominalism; On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (1991) and contributing writer for Held Together with Water: Artwork from the Verbund Collection (2007) and numerous catalogues and articles. He curated Look, 100 Years of Contemporary Art at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels (2000) and was responsible for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003.