Marcel and Teeny Duchamp were privileged -- or maybe the balance of honor swings the other way around -- to eat the "deconstructed cuisine" at noted restaurant El Bulli. If Duchamp pioneered an art that lurks beyond the "retinal," then Ferran Adria arguably explores a cuisine that goes beyond the gustatory. On the other hand, perhaps his flavored foams and other decoctions marry the mind back to the mouth.

A special exhibition at the Israel Museum juxtaposes Duchamp's "Waistcoat for Benjamin Peret" with embroidered Chinese mandarin robes as part of an interrogation of the cultural determination of art. If a "readymade" garment is art, then does that aura translate?

One of the most extraordinary online essays on the subject of Duchamp -- in or outside the precincts of ToutFait.com -- is Yakov Rabinovich's "Duchamp: To Say the Least." From silent comedy to the arch negations of Voltaire (and wheeling back again), this study of how Duchamp's career intersects with all our ancien regimes is both exquisitely playful and essential all at once.

As a motto, "do it yourself" covers models of production ranging from the arts & crafts movement to IKEA, and from the Sex Pistols to Marcel Duchamp's readymades. The flagship DIY store in France, BHV, is paying tribute to the readymade aesthetic -- "assisted" and otherwise -- with a special retrospective of Duchampiana that opens Thursday. An illuminating segment on France24 provides an unusually literate overview of the readymade universe, its connections to home improvement retail and its antagonism to the tyranny of the retinal. (Following a roughly 3:30 Katy Perry segment.)

Marcel Duchamp was a seminal figure in the avant-garde film world for decades. In 1943, he appeared in a rarely seen short directed by Maya Deren in connection with the Guggenheim "Art of the Century" exhibit. After too long unscreened, this footage -- along with other experimental films of the era -- recently showed in Brooklyn.

A feature film about the life of Peggy Guggenheim, legendary modern art collector, patron and friend of Marcel Duchamp -- not to mention one-time bride of Max Ernst -- is moving into the development stage. Eleanor Cayre is onboard to lead the project through its early phases along with award-winning producer Nikki Silver. No casting details have yet been announced, but as filming is not even scheduled to begin until 2012, news will likely trickle out over the next few years.

The popular show "Seduction of Duchamp" is coming to the Museums of Los Gatos. While many exhibitions inadvertently become a showcase of Duchamp tributes and swipes, this one wears its influence proudly. Chess demonstrations, lectures and other events add to the ambience.

Chinese artist Zhou Wendou has made his name breaking down barriers between the mass object and the art object, or between the useful and the useless. The Duchampian slant of his aesthetic is on display -- or rather, not on display -- in his recent untitled demolition of a copy of the Fountain and reassembly of the fragments into a porcelain vase.

A recent benefit gala for the Minnesota Institute of Art featured a circus theme and such diversions as bearded ladies on display and a "wheel of dada" spinning for unique and fetishistic prizes. As local society columnist Maura Ryan put it, "Marcel Duchamp has my back."

New evidence reveals that American journalist Varian Fry, who went to Marseille in 1940 with "a checkbook and a list of 200 names," ended up saving some 4,000 people -- including the leading lights of the then-banned surrealist movement -- from the Nazi regime.

Fry helped smuggle Chagall, Ernst, Breton and Duchamp as well as Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Claude Levi-Strauss and thousands of others out of France and into New York, where the surrealists notoriously remained for some time.

The highly lauded "Twisted Pair" Duchamp-Warhol retrospective at Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum will end on September 11-12 with a gala symposium of thoughts from scholars like Francis Naumann and Hal Foster and a recital of the music of Duchamp associate John Cage. Not to be missed.

Marcel Duchamp's brother Gaston, who painted under the name Jacques Villon, will be the subject of a special exhibition co-curated by the Amsterdamn Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. Villon is best known as a neo-impressionist, but the exposure should put his work into a larger context. (Opening in September.)

Letter and word play is omnipresent in the Duchampian universe. From Rose Selavy and her noteworthy failure to sneeze to L.H.O.O.Q. and the Fresh Widow, Duchamp's titles occupy absurd, almost self-canceling linguistic spaces of their own. In the company of images and objects, they take on an even less scrutable dimension. And the more the audience opens itself to the free play of language, the deeper the puns and puzzles go.

The 1943 "VVV" portfolio of surrealist art and ideas, co-edited by Marcel Duchamp, is rightfully considered one of the highlights of the movement's New York period. An exhibition of images from that era -- currently at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art -- opens up the extremely limited edition (20 copies were printed and personalized) to perhaps its biggest public ever. Duchamp. Breton. Ernst. Tanguy. Carrington. Masson. Calder. Chagall. Matta and more....

The Boston-area DeCordova Sculpture Park has created an iPhone app that allows visitors to eavesdrop on pre-recorded auto-commentary on the pieces on display. Notably, the recorded critics found Ilan Averbuch's "Skirt and Pants (after Duchamp)" to be "uncomfortably reverential," although there appears to be some cryptic debate in the database about the work.

Such auto-commentary may resemble the silent discourse between the artist as mediator of the work, the audience and the work itself. Or it may simply add a new layer of complication if not noise.

Duchamp is invoked in reviews of Paris artist Claire Fontaine's new show in Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art. Like Duchamp, Fontaine enjoys the juxtaposition (and subtle manipulation) of everyday objects to create unique assemblies: stuffed tennis balls, bricks concealed in book jackets, coins with hidden blades.

The secret violence lurking the mundane is an omnipresent theme for Fontaine. By contrast, Duchamp's premonition of a broken arm in the form of a snow shovel seems almost innocent of both menace and overt didactic intent. Either way, once the tennis balls get into the museum, they lose their bounce.

The Duchampian ghost hangs heavy over the work of photographer Francesca Woodman, who is often described as the visual arts' answer to Sylvia Plath. But if Plath needed an answer, then the persistence of mystery -- the infrathin sense that resolution is on the tip of the tongue or eye -- in Woodman's heavily conceptual images may only open up new questions.

The New Republic notes that the work of "dilettante of near genius" Christian Marclay (currently at the Whitney Museum) is characterized by lightness deriving from the artist's admiration for Marcel Duchamp as both conceptual thinker and gamesman.

Video demonstrates the similarities better than still photographs.

Despite lackluster notices, a current video retrospective at the Whitney Museum offers at least one highlight -- Hannah Wilkes' 1976 performance piece, "Through the Large Glass." The short video both literalizes Duchamp's seminal assemblage as Wilkes plays the role of the "Bride" stripping bare in front of the malic molds and subverts its masculine point of view. What does the Large Glass entail from the bride's perspective? Can we see the "Bachelors" any better from here?

The Surrealists appear to have lost their power to shock the Scottish press. Reviews of the ongoing retrospective at the Edinburgh Dean Gallery have wavered between bewilderment and boredom, with a few dutiful explanations of how the Dalis, Magrittes and Duchamps on display fit into modern art history.

Perhaps the trappings of the surreal -- the melting watches, headless hats and especially the museum-grade toiletries -- have simply become more retinal art for art patrons to ponder. But on the other hand, the inner depths of these paintings and assemblies may not yet have been plumpbed -- for example, one review refers to Duchamp's "feminine-facing sculptures." Is this a nervous reference to the Fig Leaf and the Chastity Wedge?

Duchamp looms large over debates about the role of the observer in art. Is the observer a passive non-participant willing to sit back and be entertained by the work, or is he or she an active partner in the experience? Naturally Duchamp would opt for the latter approach -- even though it renders the artist less central to the process. And of course if both the artist and the observer are actively present, as Maria Abramovic is in her current MOMA show, then the encounter can become intense.

Christian Marclay's video tribute to the Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass treats the one object like the musical instrument it was intended to be and the other as a species of musical score -- that is, as the visual representation and record of sound.  While critics are mixed, the "Cagean-Duchampian" dimension of the work is clear.

"The ECHO exhibit at the Albright-Knox is about appropriation—borrowing, stealing, ripping off and recycling—in art, and opens with the two modern era pathfinders of the practice, Marcel Duchamp from the first part of the 20th century, and Andy Warhol from the second.

"Art always appropriated, in spades, but before the modern era what it appropriated was just art. What is called art. Painting, sculpture, architecture. Styles, forms, subjects.

"What the art of Duchamp and Warhol appropriated was everything"

Philadelphia-area artist Joe Dillon III invokes the legacy of Duchamp's readymades when explaining his mechanically assisted "spin art," but a closer spiritual ancestor may be the rotoreliefs. Dillon's art reproduces the chance operations of the rotating paint spray seen at carnivals on large-format pegboards. The end effect resembles a mandala, which is to say a rotorelief at rest (or enshrined in the museum).

Shigeko Kubota, widow of pioneering video artist Paik Nam-June and a noted member of the Fluxus movement in her own right, has published a memoir of her married life. Details of her privileged relationship with Paik (and, of course, vice versa) emerge in the text. For example, apparently her installation Marcel Duchamp's Grave played a significant influence on his own V-yramid.

Pop diva Lady Gaga, known for her ability to bridge high concepts with bawdy delivery, has paid a characteristically flashy tribute to the work of Marcel Duchamp by having a hand-inscribed urinal delivered to London fashion boutique SHOWstudio.com.

The piece -- named Armitage Skanks after its industrial manufacturer -- bears a scatological message from Gaga outlining her relationship to Duchamp and the role of humor in her own career. Although some have reported that the piece is definitely not for sale, SHOWstudio.com simply lists it as "enquire."

The "Artomatic" collective of several hundred Washington-area artists will not be able to exhibit together before 2011 at the earliest because, so far, no space large enough to contain their work has been contracted. (Reported early negotiations with a local junior high school may or may not be progressing.)

Given the uncurated, unjuried and unrestrained nature of the group's shows, critics have been prone to recollect Marcel Duchamp's early difficulties with (and revenge on) exhibition judges. On the other hand, with so much material on display, the line between museum and everything else tends to blur.

A major retrospective of the artistic career of late actor Dennis Hopper is receiving uneven reviews. After genuflecting to Hopper's apparent influences and enthusiasms -- a bit of Warhol here, an encounter with Duchamp there, Basquiat, Rauschenberg -- critics are almost invariably forced to reflect on the nature of Hopper as primarily a performer, a non-artist in the visual sense, an amateur. Some mourn the artist that could have evolved out of this slurry of modern and contemporary techniques, media, concerns.

So far, none have dared make an explicit comparison between Hopper's Hollywood non-artistic career and Duchamp's career as patron saint of non-artists. Is this a field reserved for professionals?

Two lost Man Ray pieces -- one a mobile assemblage of wooden coat hangers, the other a postcard -- have turned up in Scotland as part of the Lee Miller / Ronald Penrose estate and will be exhibited in Edinburgh through January. If only lost Duchamp pieces could turn up so often!

Indeterminacy -- in the sense used by Duchamp in the Standard Stoppages or the Musical Erratum -- was a core compositional value for John Cage. His visual work demonstrates similar impetus, from Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel onward. A major retrospective of Cage's paintings and other visual work in the London suburb of Gateshead explores these points.

Sculptor Derek Morris considers the 1917 exhibition of Fountain as the watershed of modern art, dividing studio-oriented work that went before from the conceptual work that has since conquered the art world. The Norfolk Contemporary Art Society's current show bridges the gap, with "assisted readymades" in the Duchampian mode and more salon-friendly paintings and sculpture.

The small 1964 assemblage Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy is on exhibit through October 10 at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, part of a retrospective show called "ECHO." What is exciting about this display of Why Not Sneeze is the emphasis placed on its textual dimension: mirrors allow viewers to apprehend both the work's sculptural character and scrawled title (normally hidden on its underside) simultaneously. The effect keeps both aspects of the Duchampian pun (mot/chose) in the mind's eye.

The installation of one of Duchamp's Fountains in a new exhibition of dada and surrealist works at Scotland's National Gallery of Modern Art inspires plenty of local musing about how the sometimes florid sex-and-death conceptions of painters like Magritte and Miro plays into the Presbyterian milieu of formal Edinburgh. As well, there are insights about the Fountain as not so much a work of found sculpture to be appreciated in sculptural terms, but as a work of anti-sculpture, a provocation designed to antagonize.

(This particular Fountain, for those keeping score, was brought up from the Tate.)

Reflections on Duchamp -- the readymades, chance pieces and general "conceptual" art -- provide a solid backstop to the photography and installations of contemporary artist Lindsey Price. In fact, at least one critic seems more anxious to rehearse the Duchampian than the Pricean aspects of her current show at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.

Hans Richter's 1947 film Dreams That Money Can Buy was revived recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Man Ray worked on the project, making it an extraordinary snapshot of a relatively brief moment in postwar time.

MOMA's newly reopened contemporary art galleries contain plenty of references -- oblique and direct -- to the role of Marcel Duchamp as father of conceptual art. One piece now on display is Franco-Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping's epic "Long Scroll," which cycles through his artistic genealogy across the span of some 50 feet of classically oriented imagery.

Amid the Buddhas and geometric abstractions, careful viewers will find bottleracks and more.

Marcel Duchamp was a significant influence on Andy Warhol. From the early readymades to the Pop Art masterpieces, the underlying line of thought is clear: everything can carry the aura of "art." Mass-produced objects can be "art." Advertising images can be "art."

While the Fountain is often given pride of place among Duchamp's readymades, the Bottle Rack is the inspiration for a new glass work by Beth Lipman: the Bride. Five tiers of glass, references to the "large glass," a somewhat dark sensibility.

Noted art dealer and publisher Robert Shapazian, best known for stewarding the Gagosian Gallery of Beverly Hills since its founding, has died at age 67 of lung cancer. He was an influential Duchamp critic and, in his role as head of the Lapis Press, published innovative studies of Duchamp's work.

The Fortean Times, noted journal of the bizarre and uncommensurable, has guarded praise for the Barbican's "Surreal House" exhibition. The gallery spaces are the truly disorienting element of the show, writes Jen Ogilvie. The content -- like Duchamp's Please Touch repurposed as an erotic doorbell -- presents only the occasional "funhouse flourish."

Is Marcel Duchamp one of the world's least collectible artists? The assertion seems odd given the numinous quality that every scrap of material associated with the artist has achieved in the marketplace, but while the relic hunters are active, supply is constrained. ARTINFO puts him on the uncollectible list.

An enlightening exhibit at Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia weaves together the ruptures of postwar art to focus on the interplay between readymade and spectacle in 1957 through 1962. Duchamp's shadow broods large over the whole, which is punctuated by the death of Jackson Pollack and the dawn of the public careers of artists like Tinguely, Oldenburg, Klein, Johns. Necessary and promethean.

(Through September)

Duchamp's "underground" career -- decades ostensibly away from the art world in pursuit of chess -- is a touchstone for youthful artist Mark Bloch, who has taken the gameboard out of the underground and bck into the museum gallery in his recent series, Storage Museums. There's an element of travel chess here too, not to mention the Museum in a Suitcase...

An "ominous" picture by artist Mark D currently hanging in the British Royal Academy of Art depicts what appears to be a dessicated Marcel Duchamp adrift on a dark and desolate sea. Only carrion birds, volcanic ash and the totemic shark of the Stuckist art movement -- to which Mark D belongs -- punctuate the gloom. The shark, the Stuckists explain, refers to the career of Damien Hirst. Was Duchamp the victim of art history or its instigator? The little boat Rose Selavy looks dubiously seaworthy....

Tobias Wong, often considered a successor to the ironic aspects of Marcel Duchamp's career on the margins of art, killed himself late last month at the age of 35. He will be remembered for his "readydesigned" objects, which carry the readymade art concept into the marketplace of contemporary branded mass consumptions. A sensitive recent obituary situates Wong in an explicitly Duchampian theoretical context.

The current show at BALTIC features a response from eight contemporary artists to a piece of work developed while Cage was at the New School of Social Research. And 60 years on, artists are still drawing inspiration from the avant garde composer’s life and work.(Through September 19.)

Punk is theater, argues Stefany Anne Golberg, and dada was theater. How much does the iconic poster for the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" single owe to Duchamp's pioneering use of safety pins to hold Tu m' together? The pin pierces and intrudes on the picture plane, unifying the composition by subverting its surface integrity.

London's Whitechapel Gallery is exhibiting two versions of Duchamp's "Fountain" -- one of the porcelain replica "originals" and Sherrie Levine's cast-in-bronze tribute -- through September 5. The focus is on materials, corporeal reality, the body and its limitations.

Daniel Spoerri's work with food and its remains has recently returned to the public's attention as the now-80-year-old artist excavates a banquet he buried in 1983. The project has also reminded some critics of his noted "readymade" exhibition of the detritus of a meal served to Marcel Duchamp, with whom Spoerri associated in the 1950s.

A bicycle wheel bisects Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy in William Schinsky's shoe-based work "Duchamp/Selavy," on display in Palm Desert, California for much of this summer. As Schinsky points out, Duchamp was indeed a courageous gentleman who "did things out of the mainstream.

The Duchampian idea of readymade as household tool abstracted from its useful context receives new nuances in Indian artist Subodh Gupta's "Chimta" series, which assembles thousands of steel bread tongs into monumental aggregates. One such piece, from 2003, will be auctioned off at Christie's in London next week. Estimated sales price is in the $250,000 to $350,000 range.

Notorious Duchamp collaborator Beatrice Wood recently won favorable notice in the New York Times for her "whimsical and playful" ceramic universe. The subversive and often erotic figural work apparently passed without notice but Duchamp scholars will likely find plenty of earthy humor frozen in clay.

Louise Bourgeois, the noted sculptor who knew and worked with many of the seminal members of the surrealist group (including Marcel Duchamp), died Monday in New York. She was 98 years old and had been producing horrors, marvels and enigmas for seven decades.

The Barbican gallery's "Surreal House" exhibit has opened and is drawing insightful reviews, most recently from the Financial Times. If the act of building and maintaining a home reflects the process of being in the world, then the surrealist project subverts that process by making "home" un-homelike.

As the curator of a new show at Princeton's Paul Robeson Center of Art points out, sometimes progress is really a matter of circling back around to the origin, only to see the place for the first time. In other words, history can be all about reinventing the wheel.

The show, which runs through July 2, takes a new spin on Marcel Duchamp's "assisted readymades" by placing the iconic mounted Bicycle Wheel in a new and mobile context. Can it be spun, and if so, will its path be smooth or jittery?

Another highlight is Ji Li's "Duchamp Reloaded," which resituates a copy of Duchamp's wheel in a curbside environment. The piece has already been vandalized.

When collectors pay $10 million, $100 million or more for a numinous Picasso, Giacometti or Van Gogh, what are they buying? What value does the artist add through labor, vision, experience and, ultimately, signature? Why do objects with a peripheral or disputed association with a bankable body of work take on something of the aura of medieval relics?

Who was R. Mutt?

Recent critical reception of conceptual artist Christian Boltanski's work (such as No Man's Land, in which menswear is sifted endlessly) has struggled to invoke the legacy of Marcel Duchamp as patron of the "big questions" about the function of art, or at very least the instigator of the little gestures of art-as-provocation.

Boltanski himself appears more conflicted in his relationship to the readymade master, having deliberately erased the portions of his collected press interviews that deal with Duchamp among other subjects. As he notes, "I think I said that I don't like Duchamp, but that is totally stupid because I know that Duchamp is a very important man." Once these conversational witticisms are frozen in print, they become pernicious....

The Andy Warhol Museum is holding a special retrospective of the connections between Warhol and Duchamp; as the museum promises, "many Duchamp works" are on loan from the Moderna Musee in Stockholm, and new archival material should generate new insights into how Warhol viewed Duchamp and how their works -- now enshrined on opposite ends of Pennsylvania -- inform each other.

(Through September 5;  www.warhol.org.)

The line between art and seigniorage, creation and currency fascinated Duchamp and was the focus of several minor works -- notably the Monte Carlo bonds and the little-discussed Tzanck Check of 1919 -- as well as major endeavors like the traveling salesman's Box in a Valise and other readymade reproductions. A recent study of art currencies brings these marriages of concept and commerce into a larger historical context.

A major exhibition of works from the Carl Solway Gallery's 48-year collection highlights the work of conceptual artists like Buckminster Fuller, Nam June Paik and especially John Cage. Solway, now 75, befriended Cage in the late 1960s and eventually published the composer's relatively little-known modular tribute to his own influences, Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel Duchamp. Some unsold inventory remains, Solway says.

(Through July 30 in Cincinnati.)

Duchamp's latex breast beckons visitors to the Barbican's "Surreal House" exhibition this summer. In fact, the sculpture -- originally brought to bear as the cover to the 1947 "Surrealism in 1947" show catalog -- serves as the doorbell for a haunted structure designed by London architect firm Carmody Groarke.

Once inside, fans of surrealism will be able to view works by Dalí, Bourgeois, Magritte and other giants of the movement as well as films by Buster Keaton, Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren and similar surrealist allies.

Miami's Spinello Gallery recently exhibited a fully functional washing machine and attached clothes line signed by local artist Lee Materazzi and titled "Mother." Although the artist hopes its $5,000 asking price will make it accessible to casual collectors, it has as yet found no buyers despite its obvious Duchampian aura.

A pair of Italian artists who spent two years pilfering fragments of various celebrated contemporary art objects are now exhibiting their collection of souvenirs under the heading "Stolen Pieces."

Eva and Franco Mattes chipped, clipped and pried bits of works by Oldenburg, Beuys, Warhol, Koons and even Duchamp out of their museum settings and arranged them under glass. The pursuit of these trophies raises poignant questions about the curatorial impulse -- is the museum really just a magpie's hoard writ large? -- and the ontological place of contemporary art objects. Is it still a Duchamp (replica) if the label has been chiseled off? Or is it just another (fake) urinal?

At Postmasters in New York through June 19.

An exhibition opening this weekend at the National Gallery of Art highlights the interest of Deborah and Ed Shein in American modernist art. Among the works on display are Fresh Widow, an assisted and unusually complex replica readymade originally attributed to Rose Selavy. Notably, as the NGA catalog puts it, the windows themselves have been rendered opaque if not shuttered outright.

Nepali artist Kapil Mani Dixit alludes to Duchamp among other artistic luminaries in his upcoming show in Kathmandu, "Tribute to the Great Artists." Dixit's engagement with Picasso in particular is a constant in his work; other paintings executed in his distinctive Himalayan-influenced style nod to Frieda Kahlo, Gustav Klimt and others.

Andor Lilienthal, the last of the original 27 grandmasters honored by the World Chess Federation in 1950, has died in Budapest at age 99. He regularly competed against Marcel Duchamp in tournament contexts and considered the artist the most talented chess player to come out of France.

The emergence of sound art as a critical category has sparked new interest in the "imaginary sound sculptures" of Marcel Duchamp and his disciples like John Cage. Acoustic artist Susan Philipsz is even up for the Turner Prize. But how do these abstract soundscapes differ from the conventional category of music, and how do they converge with the pure Duchampian concept?

This seems to be the season for Duchamp-inspired sculpture to win awards at regional art exhibitions. Ontario sculptor Arne Roosman recently won the Victoria Wines Award for the "Homage to Marcel Duchamp" he entered in the Art Gallery of Bancroft's recent invitational show.

Judge Allan O'Marra called the piece "a fun and cheeky marriage of materials" and "a clever nod to art history."

Often considered a "neo-Dadaist," sculptor Richard jackson enjoys punning themes, the deflation of "art" as a sublime category and intense primary color. His  Pump Pee Doo, currently on display in Vancouver, is generally considered a complicated reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, Fountain. While some critics dismiss it as a one-note extravaganza, others concede that it's pretty bright. And there are those who ponder what all this has to do with the Pompidou, the seemingly endless well through which art flows. 

The legend of Duchamp continues to evolve as it spreads over the world and across the decades. The Deccan Herald of Bangalore recently printed a fairly lengthy appraisal of the artist's career and influence that hits the high points of the Fountain's trajectory in particular. Sometimes it's good to get back to basics.

Joseph Saccio won the "best in show" award at the recent Art of the Northeast competition for his "Flowers for Duchamp." The mixed-media sculpture looks back to the Chocolate Grinder in a new organic format. Playful but sadly non-functional.

Reviews of the new film "Exit Through the Gift Shop" often invoke Duchamp as the patron saint of the deadpan artistic fake-out. While it would be simplistic to dismiss the Fountain as what the British would call a "piss take," there is something Duchampian in the play between simulacrum and authenticity that's apparently at stake here.

Duchampiania brought in $214,000 at Christie's recent New York sale of "Prints and Multiples," with seven of the eight works on the block fetching higher-than-expected prices.

The centerpiece of the auction was a posthumous copy of the Boîte-en-Valise, which sold for $92,500; earlier estimates valued it at $50,000 to $70,000. Other works of Duchampian interest included a copy of the Green Box ($35,000), a "scuffed" set of rotoreliefs ($25,000), two states of the Bouche-Evier (silver and bronze) and posters from the 1959 and 1967 retrospectives of the artist's career.

Now 77, Joan Bakewell, the BBC news presenter who interviewed Marcel Duchamp in the summer of 1968, remembers him as one of the most "important" people she spoke with during her career. As she notes, Duchamp was "extraordinary, smiled a lot, smoked big cigars."

The interview itself is available here.

A recent blog post listing various cases in which museum goers accidentally damaged art on display is amusing, but seems strangely silent where deliberate vandalism or "performance" is involved. Where's Tony Shafrazi's defacement of Guernica? All the efforts over the years to destroy the Mona Lisa? Where's the Fountain?

While attempts by Pierre Pinoncelli and others to damage or "intervene with" Duchamp's urinal may not qualify as accidents, they definitely count as occasions when the relationship between art, spectator and museum was "mangled." Likewise, the inclusion of the Fountain itself into a museum context originally mangled something.

Although Duchamp's notes on the aesthetic concept he termed the "infrathin" (or in French, the infra-mince) are fragmentary, in their collective bulk they add up to a significant body of work describing otherwise unmeasurable nuances in art, language, life. Blogger Ethan has been collecting these scattered references for about six weeks now.

While the infrathin may not be defined -- the coffee grinder grinds ineffably fine -- it can perhaps be traced.

The Brooklyn Museum's annual gala featured plenty of surrealist-inspired edible art this year, including melting heads sculpted from cheese, a 20-foot Andy Warhol head filled with snack cakes and plenty of dead rabbits to explain painting to. While the champagne fountains were explicitly Duchampian in lineage, they seemed somewhat upscale compared to the original; on the other hand, cycling bubbly through an actual working urinal would probably have presented logistical problems.

A recent article on ArtDaily.org promises "'Original' Reproductions by Marcel Duchamp at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art" and provides a precis of the relationship between authenticity, "assistance" and the readymade that is both elegant and penetrating. However, "its context is not quite clear." Is the Tel Aviv Museum hosting a Duchamp show? There is as yet no sign of this on the museum's site, unless perhaps it is part of the evocative circulating library of reproductions. The nuances would perhaps not be lost on Duchamp himself, who carried his own museum of genuine copies in a suitcase, always ready for a gala opening.

The waterfall at Forestay is famous as the backdrop for Duchamp's final work, Etant donnes. But as yet, little formal research has been done on just why the artist picked this particular bit of landscape and what it means. (As the subtitle indicates, the two "given" premises of the work are "the waterfall" and "the illuminating gas.")

An upcoming symposium at Forestay aims to fill the gap with lectures and an exhibition of relatively rare Duchampiania, as well as a concert of the artist's "Musical Erratum."

(Opening May 7; events continue through June 13.)

In a somewhat bizarre dispute between film critic Roger Ebert and various advocates of video games as art, the shade of Marcel Duchamp has been invoked essentially to argue that "art is in the eye of the beholder." Most of these arguments have been perfunctory, but noted comic book theorist Scott McCloud -- himself a veteran of other "is it Art?" controversies -- has highlighted the notion that games, like readymades (and perhaps with chess as exemplar) are largely experiments in the nature of authorship.

In this context, Ebert as defender of the idea of the film maker (or artist) as auteur is on slippery ground. If, of course, that's actually what he's defending.

Brooklyn illustrator and MFA student Anne Emond says she spends "a lot of time thinking about Marcel Duchamp." Her musings about the artist's persistent fascination are delightful in their own right, but her claim that her own art is a "picture window" and so has nothing in common with Duchamp bears deeper investigation. Surely the readymade is all about the snow shovels, urinals, bicycle wheels ... and even the picture windows themselves?

Composer Bill Fontana draws musical inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's description of the Large Glass as a form of "musical sculpture" in which sonic relationships can be preserved. While Duchamp applied "musical" principles to his malic forms, Fontana takes a "sculptural" approach to sound in the sense of using sonic elements to define space. He's also against complexity for its own sake.

Rubber stamps have a long history as a medium for cheap, easily reproduced and even "guerilla" art, with roots stretching back through the Fluxus movement to dada. A selection of stamps that originally appeared in Picasso "Daddaland" Gaglione's San Francisco gallery uncovers this hidden history and even features a few items of interest to Duchamp fans.

At New York's Stendhal Gallery through May 29.

The former director of South Korea's National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kim Yoon-soo, has been ruled innocent of what the government claimed was wrongful conduct in the purchase of a copy of Duchamp's Boite-en-valise. Kim reportedly sent a broker a conditional memorandum of understanding that he wanted to buy the miniature compendium of some of Duchamp's most famous works; an incoming cabinet minister seems to have seized the chance to purge appointees of the previous administration.

Kim, 74, receives about $73,000 in back pay and the restoration of his reputation. Unfortunately, the miniature museum itself does not appear to be represented on the museum's site at this time.

The work of Abigail Fallis makes gestures toward both environmental and conceptual "relevance," but it is through Fallis' absurdist humor that these objects most immediately connect with the viewer. An upcoming show at London's Pangolin Gallery (through July 3) demonstrates this humor through references to the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll -- and the occasional nod to the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Almost a century after Duchamp unleashed the first readymades on the world, the industrial aesthetic -- whether simply reminiscent of the factory or truly "found" -- has in some sense conquered both the museum and the workshops of contemporary sculptors and, perhaps more importantly, has bridged the divide between them. A perceptive review of an ongoing show at the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego (MCASD) explicates this "family relationship" between modern sculpture, the factory and the Fountain.

(Through June 20. mcasd.org has details.)

A blogger who recently visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art was struck by Duchamp's "assisted" readymades -- effectively assemblages -- and in particular the 1916 With Hidden Noise. Sadly the object can no longer be shaken, which makes its title (and the secret noisemaker inside) both poignant and especially compelling. The "noise" is now hidden in the museum forever; it cannot be heard as such, but lurks like an infrathin ghost...or else you can hear it here.

In conjunction with a more general exhibition of epochal works from its modern collection (1905-60), the Pompidou Center is dedicating a wall to art that was originally housed in Andre Breton's studio. Highlights include three Duchamp editions -- including copies of Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? and the Coin de Chastete -- and numerous works by surrealist comrades like Jean Arp, Francis Picabia and Roberto Matta, along with many, many anonymous sculptures of archaeological significance.

(Through June 21.)

Duchamp, we recall, was an occasional art dealer, but not a forger. Is that relevant?

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Bouldin notes that competition for sales would ordinarily push young artists into the popular categories, but points to abstraction as a mode of creating ambiguous imagery that crosses genre boundaries and so can appeal to buyers with varying retinal or sentimental tastes. Duchamp is mentioned as originator of the idea that art is not self-expression, but what would he say about this? Is art a job or no job at all?

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A major exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto (MOMAK) highlights many of retiring chief curator Shinji Kohmoto's "favorite" unclassifiable works of art from the collection, including several of Duchamp's readymades.

In the exhibit catalog, Kohmoto alludes to these works, which are officially catalogued in the museum's catchall "non-category," as containing a Duchampian "something else" -- a quality that "cannot be contained within classifications (nouns) that are commonly understood." This unclassifiable "something else" seems closely related to Duchamp's "infrathin," Duchamp's quality of the "infrathin," the "little bit extra" or unique aura that mediates between things and their connotations.

Kohmoto's career has concentrated on identifying and preserving this aura -- which allows objects into the musem -- in all its ambiguities. As he points out in his farewell catalog, "Professionals working in the system of the museum of modern art are well aware of the meaning behind Duchamp’s statement in 1961: 'Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.'"

MOMAK will have editions of readymades like the Fountain, Paris Air, Bottlerack and the Standard Stoppages on display through May 5, along with a Boite-en-valise, Duchamp's famous "museum in a suitcase." This latter work originally inspired the museum to institute the "non-category" category, since it represents a work of reproduction, assemblage and even sculpture, but primarily the act of curation in itself.

(In Kyoto. MOMAK has more details.)

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(Through April 30; gala reception April 11. peterjketchum.com has details.)

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("Twilight Visions" will run at New York's International Center of Photography through May 9.)

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And what if MOMA's "@" is a forgery?

More deeply, the question resolves to determining the point at which the Duchampian aura transubstantiates plumbing into art. Noted dealer Francis Naumann says the crucial moment is the signature; if so, the new editions are barely forgeries. Daniella Luxembourg is more open to considerations of objects that were in Duchamp's "vicinity" -- that enjoy some associational link to the artist -- as worthy of collection as "relics." It is also possible that Schwarz, known as a great friend of Duchamp, is propagating these objects as a sort of tribute to the master of appropriation. And in any event, the original is lost.

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One of the first of these "exhibitions in a box," a retrospective look at the groundbreaking 1972 Documenta show in Kassel, Germany, appears to fit into a large binder. For more information on the project and where the traveling shows are headed, the ICI has details.

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(April 21. The Davis Humanities Institute has details.) ...more

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While two explicitly Duchampian dances (Walkaround Time and An Occasion Piece) may not figure on the program, what remains is evidently in the spirit of the regular stoppages and bachelor machines. Schedule at merce.org.

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