Results tagged “Marcel Duchamp” from Real Clear Arts

Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?

That was the headline on an op-ed in The New York Times the other day by Dennis Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution and co-founder and co-editor of Arts & Letters Daily. The piece was pegged to the auction of a medicine cabinet by Damien Hirst. A key passage:

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his "ready-mades" -- a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance -- for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

But Dutton was really writing about the importance of art to humans, and the future of art. He takes a dim view of conceptual art, and opines on its future -- implying, to me at least, that he wishes the time of the current generation of conceptual artists would pass. "We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents' culture," he writes.

He concludes this way:

I can't help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn't mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it -- even before they could put their love into words.

I'm with Dutton on sharks and vacuum cleaners. My main question is why he couched his argument in terms of art's investment value -- but then again, I haven't read his book, which may have made his argument head-on. Here's a link to the NYT piece.

Back in August, while I was on vacation, Laurie Fendrich, a painter and fine arts professor who blogs for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm site, raised an interesting point about art magazines. Comparing the table of contents from ARTnews of 1957 with those of today, she wrote:

I'm not one to dwell on the idea that civilization is in decline. It probably is, but I try my best to follow Schiller's advice that you must embrace your own times, yet not let them consume you. Reading the ideas of previous eras is important for thinking men and women; wallowing in nostalgia for the past is destructive to life lived now.

Sometimes, however, you stumble across something that makes you realize, with a jolt, just how far we've fallen from what things were like fifty years ago.

Continuing, she said:

Here, verbatim, is the list of the articles and authors in that summer 1957 issue:

The Creative Act, Marcel Duchamp
The place of painting in contemporary culture, Stuart Davis
The age of the chimpanzee, Randall Jarrell
The liberating quality of avante-garde art, Meyer Shapiro
Fifty-five years of U.S. Museums, Alfred Frankfurter
My friend Picasso, Gaston Palewski
Pure paints a picture, Elaine de Kooning
New York painting only yesterday, Clement Greenberg

And later says:

If it were to go head-to-head with any table of contents, from any issue of any art magazine published during the past decade, there'd be no question as to the winner.

Well, she is entitled to her point and her preference, but I think I disagree -- and not just because if artists filled the art magazines and wrote so much about art, what would I do? 

Marcel Duchamp's interest in chess is well-known: a self-described "chess maniac," he played intensely, competed in tournaments, and carved his own set. At times, he absented himself from art to play chess almost exclusively; he encoded messages in his artworks that can only be understood by chess players.

Now come two new entries on the subject that shed more light on the obsession. On May 6, the St. Louis University Museum of Art opened "Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master," which attempts to "experience" his career "through the lens of his intense involvement with the royal game." It features many of his works, like Trebuchet, the coat rack he nailed to his studio floor referencing a chess position, as well as chess-related works by other Dada and Surrealist artists, including Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali. Smartly, the show's opening coincided with the United States Chess Championship in St. Louis. (Talk about new audiences: chess players around the world number in the hundreds of millions.)

Here's a link to the show and, since I have not seen it, to an article on the show and to a blog item on a panel held at the St Louis Chess Club, both from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

I was tipped off to all of this by Francis Naumann, the Dada/Surrealism expert who spoke at the St. Louis panel. He'll be bringing the exhibition to his New York gallery on Sept. 10. And he and the exhibition's curator are just out with a new book on the subject, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess.