The Brooklyn Rail

Marcel Duchamp’s significance to my work as a practicing artist and art historian is carried through the legacy of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes and their recuperation in the 1960s and 1970s as Conceptual art. I am part of a generation of artists who came to maturity at the tail end of Reaganism. Many of our art school professors had been hired in the ’70s and ’80s, during what feels retrospectively like an academic golden age, notwithstanding the assault on freedom of expression levied through the conservative culture wars of the early ’90s. At this time, the art history books were overwhelmingly androcentric and Western, and Duchamp’s provocations were uncritically presented as the origin of Conceptual art and institutional critique. Like other young artists at that time, I came to understand Conceptual art as an inherently critical practice.

I was and remain deeply influenced by artists like Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Sarah Charlesworth, and Robert Smithson, who asserted their own agency to become writers of their own history. They proved that artists can be both the makers and authors of their own destinies, without depending on the vicissitudes of the art world. The lines between individual autonomy and one’s subjugation to intractable economic forces seemed to be more concisely drawn in the early ’90s—the last days of the analog world. The naïvety of that seems obvious today, and one can see more clearly that Conceptual art was always uncomfortably imbricated with middle-management and the burgeoning business and information technologies which would soon take over.

As Eunsong Kim’s 2024 book The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property shows, the readymade’s position as origin story for Conceptual art is intertwined with the rise of scientific management. Kim suggests that Conceptual art as deskilled “mental” labor (compared to skilled artisans or tradespeople) should be read as an important but largely unexamined site of ongoing racial and class antagonisms. Clearly not everyone carries the social privilege of having their ideas valued, and even fewer are able to market their ideas for money. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, for example, had already claimed that a steel ring she found on the street in Manhattan was an artwork in 1913 (Enduring Ornament), one year before Duchamp’s bottle rack. Art history is littered with successful male artists who took or were given authorial credit for ideas originated or practiced by the occluded “Others” of their art worlds.

Nonetheless, decades after the fact, the story of Fountain (1917) became an even more powerful precedent for an artist’s self-invention and promotion than the object itself. Duchamp’s many refusals (early refusal to marry, refusal to paint, refusal to be “an artist”) and his equally frequent U-turns on the same refusals were inspiring as acts of innovation and “freedom” from dogma in the pluralistic art world of the 1960s. That this “freedom” was enabled through gender and class-based privilege, sponsored by the wealthy Louise and Walter Arensberg, Katherine Dreier, Peggy Guggenheim and others (not to mention the girlfriends and wives who supported him), went underacknowledged.

Duchamp’s real gift may have been his preternatural ability to read the room, so to speak—to seduce the crowd through his personality. A master of the pivot, throughout his life he excelled at redirecting potential criticism about what was sometimes considered rather ordinary artwork, towards new ventures, unorthodox claims, and jokes and puns. Like a magician, or John Baldessari’s pointing fingers, Duchamp was adept at focusing his viewers’ attention at what he wanted, so that other aspects of the work went undetected. This methodology of misdirection was powerful for a time, and has reached its apogee in contemporary politics, corpocratic media, and “personal” technologies.

Can Duchamp’s reputation survive the future? His work is collected and his legacy safely canonical, so Duchamp is too big to fail anytime soon. There are, however, aspects of his work that MoMA would be wise to highlight. His experiments with gender fluidity, his sustained investigation into perception, and his peep-show staging of what may be read as a genderqueer body in Étant donnés all seem relevant to today’s artistic and theoretical concerns. I have my doubts about Fountain. The showmanship of such ordinary objects recast as privileged forms of artist labor may not survive the growing mistrust and disgust the working class has for the wealthiest members of society. The fact that Sotheby’s sold Maurizio Cattelan’s solid gold toilet, America (ca. 2016), at auction in 2025 for $12.1 million to the global franchise Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a perverse inversion of what once might have been a radical gesture. In this new Gilded Age, most of us are not buying it.