The new generation of artists that emerged in the late fifties/early sixties did not wait for the seventy-six-year-old Marcel Duchamp to be given his first museum exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 to be—or so the story goes—under his influence. Yet the wobbly concept of influence seems inadequate to account for such sudden efflorescence. How would you personally account for it? Do you think that the current MoMA exhibition will—or should—significantly change our critical perception of Duchamp’s work?

What I think you think, if you are a well-informed art lover who visits the galleries and reads the Brooklyn Rail, is that Fountain, Marcel Duchamp’s famous and infamous urinal signed R. Mutt and dated 1917, initiated a sea change in the art world: a radical break and not just a new style, as the one set in motion by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).