India’s Tata Nano to follow the trajectory of Duchamp’s Fountaine?

March 22, 2011 Any purported parallel trajectory between Marcel Duchamp’s Fountaine (1918) and India’s Tata Nano may strike many as odd.  After all, what does the most infamous urinal that rocked the art world in the twentieth century has in common with a compact car produced in India in the twenty-first? If the story of  Duchamp’s Fountain largely describes an inconsequential object, morphed into a concept, that has indelicately grown in momentum with time, what.. read more...

Man Ray’s underexposed Muse, Lover and Colleague takes the Stage.

March 21, 2011 Never attaining the name recognition she deserves, the intrepid photographer Lee Miller cut a swath through the 20th century that few, male or female, can equal. Her life story traversed some of its central dramas: artistic, stylistic, technological, humanitarian, geopolitical. It also included a nude dip in Hitler's bathtub. Now, her forbidable narrative is the subject of Behind the Eye, a new play by Carson Kreitzer. It will debut at the Cincinatti Playhouse on April 2nd, .. read more...

The Center for Olfactory Art Presents…

March 20, 2011 Marcel Duchamp is credited with composing the first ready-made, Fountain, in 1917 and the first art installation, Etant-Donnes (1946-1966). In 1938, however, Duchamp also created what was one of the world's first olfaction-based installations for the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Beaux-arts Gallery in Paris. Duchamp would design the experience of the exhibit: he transformed the main hall into a "subterranean cave" by hanging bags of coal from the c.. read more...

shenanigans in Washington Square

March 18, 2011 This picture of Duchamp was caught on the linked webpage by kismet. It brought to mind the story Ralph Gardner of the Wall Street Journal had recently chronicled about his adventure inside the Washington Arch.  According to Parks department head preservationist John Krawchuck, Duchamp and his cohort of "Bohemian" artists, such as John Sloan and poet Gertrude Drick, had not only frequented and left their mark in the village, but had once broken into the arch and.. read more...

Flavorwire Surveys Bike Art Since Duchamp

March 18, 2011 "Did the non-functional bike craze begin with Marcel Duchamp?" asks Flavorwire, referring to the bicycle wheel M.D. famously mounted upside down on a stool in 1913, creating what was most probably the first kinetic sculpture. There's no question that creative bike culture is hot. At Critical Mass a couple years ago I saw a bike of the hyper-functional, rather than non-functional variety: it could make waffles while being ridden! (It had everything on it from a.. read more...

Huws of the "Word Vitrines" Brings Duchamp to (Forest) Life

March 16, 2011 "Piss Off I'm A Fountain," read the eponymous "word vitrine" of Bethan Huws's 2008 London exhibition. The text was laid out in white-on-black on an announcement board, the kind you'd see at a post office or a university auditorium. It's actually kind of hilarious spoof on Duchamp's ultimate art-world spoof: the urinal that called itself a Fountain and put itself forward as art. The defiance of the statement "Piss off..." reminds me of the cri.. read more...

O’Hara’s Early Homage to Rrose Selavy

March 15, 2011 Poets and painters have been in dialogue since as far back as anyone can tell. But, for Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), the seminal New York School poet who worked as critic for Art News and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York squat in the middle of the 20th century, art had been of especial significane. O'Hara's poems often evoke the artists that had been instrumental to his development as a writer and thinker in their characteristic expression of the int.. read more...

nothingtoodoo, Terrence Koh

March 12, 2011 The self-described “Naomi Campbell of the art world,” Terence Koh, has a new solo exhibit at the Mary Boone Gallery titled “nothingtoodoo.”  Koh’s past works include a gold-plated ornament of his excrement (Art Basel, 2008) that reportedly was sold for $500,000, a two-headed piano with protruding arms for Lady Gaga at the 2010 Grammy, and a 25 foot long urinal in tribute to Duchamp at the April 2009 “KKK” show at Mary Boone. .. read more...

Marjorie Strider Paints a New Woman for Duchamp

March 12, 2011 Her work hasn't been exhibited in New York for fifteen years, but pop-artist Marjorie Strider has finally returned to Hollis Taggart Galleries where her much anticipated show opened on March 8th. Her art, happily, remains as we remember it. Bikini-clad women, painted in flat blocks of acrylic paint, playfully engage their audience. And these ladies have real 'depth' to them: in some pieces, the more desirous parts of their bodies physically project out from the can.. read more...