Duchampian News & Views

  • Marcel Duchamp:Etant donnes at the Philidelphia Museum of Art

     February 6, 2009 The Philidelphia Museum of Art will present the exhibit Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés.  The exhibit includes the work Étant donnés, which has been described by Jasper Johns as “the strangest work of art in any museum”, plus "close to eighty works of art related to its installment, including all the known studies, photographs, erotic objects, and other materials."  The  exhibit was created to celebrate the fortiet.. read more...

  • The Heir & the Cowboy:
    Social Predisposition, Mediation & Artistic Profession in Marcel Duchamp & Jackson Pollock

     February 6, 2009 "Marcel Duchamp enjoyed the security and the support derived from his family’s station and from having the social and cultural capital he accumulated throughout his personal evolution. As a result of this inheritance, the artist was able to postpone remarkably the moment of his consecration. Jackson Pollock hailed from a family of farmers and had to go to great lengths to make a place for himself in the avant-garde art of the mid 20th century. The social space Duch.. read more...

  • Getting the Picture: Illustrated Letters in the Archives of American Art
    at the Smithsonian

     February 6, 2009

    The Smithsonian Museum’s Archives of American Art is currently presenting an exhibit of artist’s illustrated letters selected by Archives of American Art Curator of Manuscripts Liza Kirwin.  The exhibit encompesses letters from the early 1900s through the 1980s and includes letters written by Marcel Duchamp.

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  • R. Mutt sticker

     February 5, 2009 "If you want to turn your toilet into a work of art, how about adorning it with this R. Mutt sticker from Thwart Design? Replicating the 'R. Mutt 1917' signature that Marcel Duchamp put on the original Fountain, does adding the sticker to your loo make it a work of art? It's an interesting thought and continues the question that Duchamp raised with the original piece. Buy your sticker for 15 euros at Atypyk and join in by making your own ready-made sculpture.".. read more...

  • “Marcel Duchamp: a work that is not a work of art” extended for one more week

     February 1, 2009

    The popular exhibition "Marcel Duchamp: a work that is not a work of art" in La Boca, Buenos Aires will continue for an extra week.  The exhibition, which opened on November 22, 2008, was a huge sucess and has recieved 30,000 visitors.  It features 123 works by Duchamp, including objects, works on paper, and photographs, and will close Febuary 8, 2009.

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  • SMS Listening Party

     February 1, 2009

    Dissonent Plane, an experimental music store in Seattle, is partenering with Davidson Galleries to present an SMS listening party.  SMS is a "series of six portfolios of multiples released in 1968 by the surrealist William Copley" and "six of the works in the SMS portfolios are sound pieces", including a phonograph record by Marcel Duchamp.  The party will be tonight at 7 pm and will last three hours.

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  • Canada’s Only Stop: Prized Surrealist Art at the AGO this Summer

     January 28, 2009 "This summer, reality will be suspended at the Art Gallery of Ontario as it welcomes Surreal Things, an innovative exhibition organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. A Canadian exclusive which runs May 9 to August 30, 2009, this is the first exhibition to examine the influence of Surrealism on the world of design as expressed in, theatre, interiors, fashion, film, architecture, and advertising. The show explores how some of the greatest artists of the 20t.. read more...

  • The National Portrait Galley to exhibit
    “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture”

     January 27, 2009 The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C will exhibit "Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture" from March 27, 2009 to August 2, 2009.  The exhibit features portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp, many of which have never been exhibited before, in order to "demonstrate that Duchamp harnessed the power of portraiture and self-portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the ar.. read more...

  • MoMA Deifies Dada’s Top Dog, But Husband, Wife Steal Show

     January 23, 2009 In a review of the Museum of Modern Art's Dada exhibition, Mario Naves contends that Duchamp's readymades have wrongly "become 20th century classics", while Duchamp himself has been "set...up as a deity".  Naves believes that Duchamp himself, who once said "I threw the bottlerack and urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty",  would have viewed this "with amused contempt". .. read more...