Picasso vs Duchamp

Anyone going to the Cabaret Duchamp thing at the Barbican tonight?

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=14278

^^^^ Was not good. Will Gompertz is intolerable. Free champagne, so whatever.

The exhibition is a little dry but probably worth seeing.

Duchamp was only interested in genuinely new ideas about art, but he had more of these than Picasso. Picasso was a hundred times more interested in creating art and consequently created thousands more art works than Duchamp, most of them quite interesting to look at. I have a bias in favor of artists making actual stuff rather than just talking about art, so I tilt heavily toward Picasso, even though Picasso's influence has waned, while Duchamp's influence is just as strong as it ever was.

Why was duchamp so influential? The idea of an artwork that is just a single gesture, ideally a subversive one, still has currency over 100 years later. But only in visual art. This is not as common in contemporary music or literature or film.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-14-art-bad-boys-macho-work-impossible-ignore/amp

Here is a refernece to the kind of thing I’m talking about. Seems impossible without Duchamp, although there was more poetry and mystery (and less grotesquerie) in his work than like piero manzoni or someone.

I’m not saying the contemporary art world contains only these kinds of stunts. Just that it still can find a home there. Danh Vo’s survey ran at the guggenheim last year and i believe every work was some form of readymade.

Not a judgment btw. I like plenty of conceptual art. But compared to other spheres of culture the art world is kind of talking to itself i think and duchamp has something to do with that. It could just be that we arw so inundated with images now that being an image maker is not enough to sustain an audience’s attention. But then again i feel like works that deconstruct visual experience are perhaps more vital than evef

Duchamp specifically inveighed against “retinal” art, privileging ideas over the texture of experience that fascinated the great painters from the renaissance through impressionism to cubism etc. Was this liberating or oppressive?

We're 100+ years later and the notion of aesthetics as mode of perception vs presciptive fact still baffles the fuck out of people who need to share opinions, i think Marcel's thoughts still have mileage

I would say duchamp because I really love Étant donnés. The first time I went to Barcelona and was in the Gothic Quarter with all the narrow streets and doors with peepy holes, I was saying to my partner that some city should do a rambling art installation with their empty, sprawling storefronts. Commission unique artists to take over each hidden peephole space.

Maybe this has been done already.

That’s a great piece yerac.

For clarification, i’m not saying duchamp is bad, just that ao much of subsequent art history seems like footnotes to him and like why is that

Oh, I didn't even read your comments. Art is personal and based on perspective and I am not even making a comment based on history or context. I was an art history minor just because the rooms were dark and I could take naps. You just like what you like. As you should.

ugh, i kind of want to answer your original question after reading it now but it's a long roundabout answer that probably is better as a thinking out loud, drunk conversation because no one is getting paid here.

The mother of one of the artists mentioned in that Artsy article bought my grandparents' house.

i like that article because it's like a list of the most annoying tendencies of the art world. it even has dan colen in it.

in 1943 duchamp created a chess puzzle which apparently has no solution, which hasn't stopped enthusiasts from trying to solve it ever since:

https://woochess.com/en/blog/marcel-duchamps-insoluble-problem

i love that apparently "nude descending a staircase" was controversial for two completely different reasons: the public was shocked because it was so abstract and bizarre-looking, and duchamp's art colleagues were shocked because they thought the whole idea of painting a nude walking down a staircase -- regardless of what the figure actually looked like -- was insultingly outrageous. like, nudes should be painted reclining on chaises or hanging out in elysian fields, not walking downstairs!

and yeah i would pick duchamp, picasso for whatever reason has never really resonated with me, apart from the blue period paintings.

Duchamp.