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What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

At the Museum of Modern Art, the artist’s enigmatic objects are historical progenitors. It’s his play with masculinity that speaks to our time.

“You should wait 50 or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me,” Marcel Duchamp declared in a 1956 interview. The Museum of Modern Art split the difference, almost, by organizing with the Philadelphia Museum of Art a survey of Duchamp’s inventive art 70 years later. Their institutional prominence, as well as Duchamp’s status as the artist many consider the most influential of the past century, assure that he has a wide audience and that his art has enduring appeal. The work is timeless, but is it also topical? Do his creations speak to current issues?

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In the history of art, Duchamp is heralded for his inventive adoption of hardware store inventory, presented singly or juxtaposed, rarely embellished. Being three-dimensional, they could be categorized as “premade sculpture;” Duchamp termed them “readymades.” Placed in a gallery, drawing viewers’ scrutiny, his bottle rack, snow shovel or glass sphere of Paris air became “defamiliarized” and enigmatic art. For his Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp purchased it and its kitchen stool pedestal. Literalizing contemporaneous Italian Futurist painters’ and sculptors’ ardor for depicting movement, Duchamp did them better: his Wheel spins. By reorienting the act of artistic creation into maneuvers of choosing and handling the extant, Duchamp radically expanded what could be considered a work of art.

A century later, Duchamp’s procedure of presenting quotidian objects in inscrutable combinations or orientations, once confounding, today no more shocks the bourgeoisie or anyone else than do Joseph Cornell’s boxed altars of miscellanea, Robert Rauschenberg’s goat atop a painted canvas or Sarah Sze’s environmental conglomerations. In a time of Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative wall-taped banana garnering prominent attention both as art........

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