Did Marcel Duchamp Ruin Art?
Something about art disgusted Marcel Duchamp. Expression, taste, aesthetic intention—anything that gave off a whiff of the precious, he recoiled from. He was modern. He relished the impersonal operations of chance. He loved jokes and sex and the movements of modern machinery. “Painting is finished,” he said to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși at an air show in Paris in 1912, when he was 25. “Who will do any better than that propeller?” The next year, Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel onto an upside-down fork fixed to a wooden stool. He enjoyed the way the spokes rotated around a central axis, like a propeller, and how they reflected shimmering light, like a fireplace. He wouldn’t come up with the term until two years later, but Duchamp had created the first “readymade.” The mischievous, machine-obsessed, maddeningly inconsistent Frenchman was on his way to having an impact on modern creativity comparable to that of Richard Wagner or Charles Baudelaire on an earlier generation of modernists. Duchamp left behind a legacy that people either love or loathe. He …
