This weekend, I was at the San Francisco MoMA snooping around and it gave me a different perspective from which I could examine some current questions related to libraries and library materials.  Here’s a little rant, something of an unfinished thought.  Help complete it or tell me I’m crazy.  The choice is yours.

The SF MoMA has one of the classic Duchamp readymade pieces called Fountain.  You know the piece, it is the urinal signed “R. Mutt, 1917″.  Duchamp claimed that his readymades were art not because he built or created them, but because he selected them.  Because he calls them art, they are art.  Now, almost 100 years later this seems like a simple, almost obvious concept, but it caused quite an uproar at the time.  It opened the doorway to a scenario I see in contemporary art today- it made it so that EVERYONE can be an artist.  As long as one has a good reputation, a unique stunt, and an interest in calling it art they are well on their way.  This is a good thing, in my opinion- even if it means we have to suffer some pretty terrible art now and then.

So now in 2009, what is the significance of Duchamp’s readymades in a post-industrial digital world, when creating, copying, remixing and promoting a work of art is done instantaneously with the click of a mouse?  We are ALL artists now, the bloggers are self-published writers, the flickr users are self-published photographers, and on and on.  The information age creates value systems around services, not products.  If you don’t believe that, just get a sweet cellphone and sign up with a really lousy service provider and get back to me.  So the question is: could one make the 2009 equivalent of a readymade out of a service, and what would that look like?

I think perhaps a library can.

The 21st century readymade would be the ultimate facilitator of creativity, something of an information democracy machine.  Duchamp made art of objects by calling them art, and because it is a conversation about art it would seem this conversation could be confined to museums, commercial art galleries, and academia. Now is potentially a very interesting time for public libraries though.  With the birth of the internet, information about media has become inseparable from the media itself.  No longer is the library one room full of books and the museum another room full of paintings and sculpture.  Now an artist can pull, parse and manipulate library catalog information and then project it in a meaningful way in a museum (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Of course the role of the library has to change.  The future of the library lies in creating context around information objects, not in simply warehousing them.  From a digital library perspective this would be about creating and organizing data, metadata, microformats, taxonomies and ontologies; from a physical, public service perspective it is about assessing community needs, providing appropriate technology training, and finally teaching and training communities about how harness the useful and creative potential of a networked landscape of manipulable, copyable media.  How is that like a readymade?  Public library service, once it is truly transformed into an information contextualizing and instructional service, is really the ultimate free, democratic, playing-field-leveler that enables anyone to create something and call it art because they want to.  Public libraries can be the greatest creativity enabler.