Word: duchamp
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...exhibition at London's Tate Modern features three heavy hitters, the Frenchmen Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and the American Man Ray. They are associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements, but they were friends before these existed, and after they ended. Of the three, Duchamp is the towering genius. Out of his own interests, phobias and distractions, he created a new aesthetic that has survived to become the reigning spirit of today's art world. Its key idea is that anything can be a work of art. Everyone has encountered this notion. No one quite knows what it means...
...expression and artistic originality are all optional - "art" can be any object untransformed, just presented in a gallery and given a title. Andy Warhol ran with this idea in the 1960s, and so do Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst today. Art students are in awe of it. It was Duchamp who invented this concept, and his friends Ray and Picabia remained fascinated by it all their lives, even if they didn't wholly practice it; Ray used a lot of different materials, from photography to collage, and Picabia was always a painter, if a weird...
...Subversion Of the three artists, Picabia was the oldest by eight years. He was 32 when he met Duchamp in 1911. (Duchamp later said he was impressed both by Picabia's high standing in the Paris art world and by his daily intake of opium.) Ray and Duchamp were friends by 1916, when they both started working for an avant-garde art gallery in New York City; Ray was 26, Duchamp 29. Picabia was born into a wealthy family, inherited a fortune and lived the life of a playboy. Duchamp, the son of a notary, was brought...
There have been times when kinetic art - think of Marcel Duchamp's spinning bicycle wheel screwed to a stool, Alexander Calder's abstract mobiles or the self-destructing machines of Jean Tinguely - moved the art world. Recently, though, it has tended to be sidelined as the work of toymakers and garden-shed boffins, finding a warmer welcome in the science museum than the art gallery. That's no bad thing, to judge from "Fantastical Mechanisms - Machines Tell Stories," the biggest exhibition of its kind in Europe since the '60s, on show at the dashingly futuristic Phaeno science center in Wolfsburg...
...mixing in mainly avant-garde circles, decided to open her own gallery at the age of 39. She famously declared an intention to "buy a picture a day," but Guggenheim was no dippy dilettante. Around her she collected the best committee of art advisers imaginable, from Marcel Duchamp to Samuel Beckett, who urged her to focus on the contemporary. It was back in New York, where she and then husband Max Ernst had decamped to escape the war, that she hit the jackpot. One of the young artists she set her sights on was a custodian and art preparator...