Duchamp Runs Away With Christie’s Sale

April 29, 2010 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 .. read more...

Joan Bakewell Remembers Duchamp

April 28, 2010

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.

 

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Museum Mangles and the Fountain

April 27, 2010 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 definite.. read more...

Stalking the Infrathin

April 26, 2010 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.  .. read more...

Drinking Champagne from the ‘Fountain’

April 23, 2010 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 probl.. read more...

Original Reproductions in Tel Aviv

April 22, 2010 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 l.. read more...

Given: the Waterfall

April 21, 2010 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 Ducham.. read more...

Roger Ebert Versus Video Games, Duchamp Against All?

April 20, 2010 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) ar.. read more...

Picture Windows: The Fresh Widow, the Peephole, Conceptual Art

April 19, 2010 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?  .. read more...