A Genial Demolitionist

Marcel Duchamp’s work is untouchable. That’s no surprise. He didn’t want to touch us. The chilliness of the Duchamp retrospective that opened last spring at the Museum of Modern Art in New York mirrors the artist’s own attitude. His work is a refusal — of avidity, energy, empathy, everything that makes art art. In the more than a century since he first selected an ordinary object (a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel, a bottle rack) and announced that he’d invented what he called a Readymade, his nihilism has become a pervasive attitude in the arts. He did say, at a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, “I don’t want to destroy art for anybody else but myself, that’s all.” But whatever he thought about the personal orientation of his program, his ideas have exerted an influence that has spread far and wide. The fascination of Duchamp and his work is no easier to explain than the fascination of fascism. This is aesthetic fascism — a yearning for total control.

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