3.6.8 Duchamp’s famous joke

There is a difference between an intelligent, educated man making what amounts to a snide conceptual joke with a little implied criticism of the art establishment—one that was both original and probably took at least a certain amount of guts—and the throngs of witless pseudo-intellectuals who have blindly followed in his footsteps—most not even knowing that whatever latest version of the ‘new thing’ they perpetrate is nothing but more rehash of the big Dada joke from going on a century ago.

The real indictment here is not of ‘Fountain;’ of Duchamp pulling what amounts to the equivalent of a college prank, but of artists too frightened of their own shadows to run the risk of being left behind or labeled un-hip, of dealers and historians willing to say anything to make a sale or publish an article, of a public completely disarmed of the philosophical tools needed to debunk the blatant irrationalism behind the aesthetics (not to mention politics) of pre-war Europe, and most of all, of the philosophers of the preceding century who did the disarming.

The other side of this, however, is that people like Tzara and Duchamp helped a century of artists to realize that they didn’t have to paint antiseptic flowers, or stultifying classical scenes from a dead mythology to be artists—that art could be lively, could be exciting; that it could be a grand adventure or a holy crusade; that art, most of all, could actually be fun. The 20th century may have seen the worst art in history, it may have been filled with bushels of pseudo-art masquerading as something deep, but it also saw an explosion of color, of vitality and of originality unmatched in all history.

Based on a comment posted to Tara Volpe's
tribe.net blog
2007.6.29