Read My Lips - the blog

In the eye of the beholder

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to this year's Turner Prize which takes place on Monday.

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was second,

with Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych from 1962 coming third.

Duchcamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it and put it on display in 1917.

"The choice of Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock," said art expert Simon Wilson.

"But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."

Duchamp has influenced many contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin - her unmade bed was inspired by the French artist. - Source.

"Duchamp was a terrorist and so was Hitler." This alarming statement was made by the well-known art critic Donald Kuspit, who apparently misunderstood the intent and meaning of Zugzwang, a provocative installation by the German artist Rudolf Herz that consisted of a gallery whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with black-and-white photographic portraits of Duchamp and Hitler.

Kuspit's Freudian readings of Duchamp are, at best, misguided, and at worst, ignorant. They are, in part, based on his acceptance of a false premise: that Duchamp could not paint as well as Matisse, and, therefore, simply gave up trying. "I think the readymade was born of Duchamp's awareness of his inadequacy as an artist," Kuspit asserts, "his way of covering up his lack of imagination." In dismissing the significance of his readymades, Duchamp avoided the inevitable issue of their artistic status and esthetic content, something which he claimed they did not possess (they were selected with what he called "esthetic indifference"). Engaging in a discussion about these works would only cause Duchamp to appear as though he were defending them, and he was intelligent enough to know that this was not his job. As Leo Steinberg once put it, "If you want the truth about a work of art, be sure always to get your data from the horse's mouth, bearing in mind that the artist is the one selling the horse."
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In dismissing the significance of his readymades, Duchamp avoided the inevitable issue of their artistic status and esthetic content, something which he claimed they did not possess (they were selected with what he called "esthetic indifference"). Engaging in a discussion about these works would only cause Duchamp to appear as though he were defending them, and he was intelligent enough to know that this was not his job. As Leo Steinberg once put it, "If you want the truth about a work of art, be sure always to get your data from the horse's mouth, bearing in mind that the artist is the one selling the horse." (8)

Duchamp was not, of course, selling his readymades, but he was certainly in support of the ideas that brought them into existence. A more effective argument would come later, by people like me who wholeheartedly support the work and the conceptual strategies that brought it into being. I suppose, according to paranoiacs like Kuspit, who cannot find a sufficient explanation for Duchamp's success, we are simply working on behalf of a worldwide intellectual conspiracy. Source.