The concept of the original, the sole extant example of an object, is what gives art works status in the hierarchy of objects. This concept is based on the belief in the artistic quality of the object or its artistic originality. Contemporary art began to greatly displace this standard belief from the early 20th century onwards. The principal criticism on this concept was given by Marcel Duchamp, and his readymades or "found art" works. In these works he clarified the fact that it was not the object's material or formal qualities that determined whether or not an object was a work of art, but rather the acknowledgement by the artist and confirmation of that belief by the viewer. Further, this clarified that there was a process and context for such acknowledgement and confirmation of an art work.
  Duchamp's Fountain (1917), entered but not displayed in the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, was an example of this readymade concept and a Dadaist anti-art demonstration in the face of the modern art system (museums, exhibitions) set as the standard for art. However, he also paid careful attention to preserving the "status" of his works (including his readymade works) as art works. If such distinctions between art work and utilitarian object, a single original work and a mass-produced work, fine art and subculture are essentially dependant on their historical context, then it is important for an artist to preserve the historical context of his/her own creativity in order to maintain the status of his/her art work. Duchamp did not need to note that after the readymade works, namely two major works Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23) and the Given: 1. Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (1944-66), he tended towards the concrete internalization of the context within the work itself through the spreading of a network of intricate relationships between the elements that make up a work. Further, another important element of Duchamp's work was the preservation of images and texts in an almost archivist-type fashion, such as the Green Box (1934), the name generally given to a box made up of miniatures of the elements in the Large Glass and replicas of various memos.
  Duchamp's creation of works, while focusing on the preservation of his own personal archive that intentionally created an historical context for his own activities, was by no means an exceptional phenomenon. Other artists creating historical context included Picasso, who from a certain date recorded not only the year, but also the month and day that a work was created; Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographic works resemble the image collection of an industrial archaeologist, and Gerhard Richter, who published his Atlas that includes the photographs and printed images that he used as the sources for his paintings. This paper will use Duchamp as its starting point in a consideration of two or three aspects regarding the issue of the "original" in contemporary art and the connection with archival thoughts by artists.