Word: duchamps
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...Duchamp exhibited a urinal as art. He shocked New York when he was in his 20s with a painting supposedly of a nude woman descending a staircase, which had no woman visible, just strange, machine-like, abstract forms. All three artists did parody paintings, mocking taste. Ray painted in a bright, cheerfully kitsch style recalling décor in the background of middle-class apartments in old Hollywood movies. Picabia painted textured abstracts that had nothing but a few primitive dots on them resembling enlarged points of light. (In 1950, the art critic for TIME said they...
...media in its impact and pizazz. So they produce objects that tend to be lurid. It is as if the whole endeavor of art cannot be taken seriously unless the artists lead celebrity lifestyles, and unless their output has the packaging and sheen of Hollywood movies or expensive cars. Duchamp's circle lived for outrageous gestures, yet there was no sense of an already streamlined system for them to operate within professionally, as there is today. Or, where there was, they instinctively undermined...
...three men made machines into creepy, modern sex totems, creating metaphors for the sex act out of pistons, wheels and shafts. They plundered popular-?science books for imagery. They were exhibitionists in the pathological sense, having themselves photographed in nutty get-ups: Duchamp with his hair shampoo-lathered into devil-horn shapes or shaved in the form of a star, or dressed up as a woman; Picabia with his bare chest puffed out, posing as a classical god; and Ray in a photographic self-portrait with half a beard...
...Sloth Ray, Picabia and Duchamp all earnestly educated their audience in seeing new ways for art to be art, while at the same time insulting that audience with attention-grabbing laziness and insouciance. They socialized and threw parties, and helped the rich collectors who were intrigued by them to choose the right works by the right established figures - Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi and so on - to improve their collections. But they pretended they couldn't be bothered to compete with such masters...
They were geniuses of not caring. When Duchamp died in 1968 it was discovered that he'd been secretly working for two decades on a complicated installation with sparkling light, an invisible motor and a nude woman made of plaster casts of body parts covered in calfskin. (She was modeled on the wife of a Brazilian diplomat in New York, with whom he'd had a long, clandestine love affair.) But for years, Duchamp, who lived in a modest, $40-a-month apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, told his friends he'd given art up for chess and philosophical...