Broodthaers claims and then augments Mallarmé’s poem to produce a new, third body, a field between the works.  The whole is without novelty, save the spacing of one’s reading; the blanks, in effect, assume importance. The madness of the “a self-annihilating nothing” prescription. But this was only to be expected, since Broodthaers was an imitation artist. It may be that the supreme triumph of such advanced art is to cast doubt on its own validity, mixing a deep scandalous laughter with the religious spirit. There’s a violence in this turn, the same violence that attends graffiti: Don’t think, look!