that would have done it

Would you Adam and Eve it that God got it wrong when he said “Don’t Eat The Fruit” its obvious if you say “Don’t” they will he should have said “Don’t Eat the Snake”

…things might have turned out different

On reflection, given the title of his series,I’m now minded to think it was an extremely partial and one-sided perspective on the power – and the world – of art. I wonder why he didn’t try to explore some of the art of other cultures?

I’m finding myself more and more drawn to the great artists within Japanese art as I begin to understand the sort of impact they’ve had on other artists I admire and artistic ‘traditions’ generally.

It’s certainly true that Duchamp isn’t the painter that Picasso was; but if you want a painter, I wouldn’t send you to Picasso anyway, he was another idea man (though you don’t need any theoretical background to “get’ Guernica).

If, on the other hand, you want someone to deconstruct the traditions of Western Art, I couldn’t recommend anyone better than Duchamp.

I think one of the reasons he is downplayed and only begrudgingly respected by the entrenched modernist establishment that has been rewriting art history for the past 70 years, is that he is a major embarrassment. He covered most of the ground they laid claim to, did it better, and did it 30-50 years ahead of them.

In addition to his forays into cubism (admittedly following Braque and Picasso), he pioneered, in one form or another, the foundations of most of what postwar modernism would lay claim to: found art, op art, pop art, minimalism, abstraction, conceptual art, happenings (performance art), drip painting, accidental art, and, of course, the deconstruction of artistic forms and traditions that he was credited for as the major force in Dada and one of the mentors of Surrealism.

He broke the canvas up not only in space, but in time (as his nude descended her staircase over multiple moments in a single image). If Duchamp is margarine, I can’t believe it’s not butter.

You also don’t need a theory to know, when faced with R. Mutt’s urinal or the mustachioed reproduction of the Mona Lisa, that Duchamp is either questioning the very definition of art, or pulling your leg. (Actually, of course, it’s both; which is one of the other things the oh-so-serious postwar modernists didn’t like about Duchamp or Dada, they did it with humor. Unforgivable!)

Yes, Rothko geve us his emotional response to color as color, even color as emotion, but would the course of art history have been all that different if he had not? I submit that it wouldn’t have. Wheras, without Duchamp, the subsequent 80 years or so would have been markedly different (better or worse, who knows? but different).

Modernism tore down the edifice of Western art and exposed its haunted skeleton, and Duchamp was the one who stripped it bare, like… well, like The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.