In many fields, the generic has subsumed the specific. In music, for example, various genres or periods have evolved (after Cage) into “sound” as a generic practice. Theater, music, dance, film, and visual art are often blurred into “performance.” But Composition resists being subsumed by notions like “text” or “document.” We insist on the academic as a distinction; we don’t make the passage to art-ness, to beyond-academic-writingness; only certain-styled work can count as our writing. But Duchamp, in his readymades, interrupted the easy Modernist definition: choosing a porcelain urinal, a snow shovel, a comb, a typewriter cover, anything whatever, and then announcing it as art, disrupted the entire dynamic that named only the specific, tradition-encoded as art. Happenings artists took to such a liberating gesture immediately: suddenly the world was full of potential art; as Kaprow put it, the artist suddenly “realized . . . at that moment he had enough material for endless one-man shows” (Kostelanetz Theatre 102). What Duchamp did with the readymade was to legitimate a wholly unique, untraditional situation: “you can now be an artist without being either a painter, or a sculptor, or a composer, or a writer, or an architect—an artist at large. . . . Duchamp liberated subsequent artists from the constraints of a particular art—or skill” (de Duve Kant 154). And yet the best theorists in our field—like Bartholomae— continue to try and determine those now-dissolved constraints on “art in a raw state—à l’état brut—bad, good or indifferent” (Duchamp 139).