Art: Be Shocking

Marcel Duchamp is a keen old (62) knife-blade of a man whose greatest interest now is chess. Once upon a time (before World War I) he stood among the wildest and wittiest cutups of modern art. His blurred, brown vision of a Nude Descending a Staircase step by step in a flood of toppling geometrical shapes was a revelation as well as a shock to his contemporaries. Related to cubism and to movies as well, it seemed to point one new way of painting things in motion. His later dadaist* “ready-mades,” e,g,, a bird cage crammed with marble cubes and labeled Why Not Sneeze? pointed to no such technique, but they had shock value, and to Duchamp that was all-important.

Last week the ex-dadaist turned up at Chicago’s Art Institute for a showing of the collection of Hollywood Author Walter Arensberg (which includes 30 Du-champs). Surveying his own work and that of other moderns in the collection, Duchamp could barely suppress a yawn. “It isn’t that modern art is dead,” he politely explained, “it’s just finished, gone.” It is gone, Duchamp believes, for the simple reason that it doesn’t shock anyone any more. “Unless a picture shocks it is nothing—a calendar painting.” To be any good, he argued, a work of art must express a new idea, which is bound to be shocking. According to Duchamp, such maestros as Picasso, Matisse and the other old men of modern art long ago ran out of ideas. “I myself haven’t given up painting,” he finished hopefully, “I’m just not painting now, but if I have an idea tomorrow I will do it.”

*The dadaists, who deliberately fostered nonsensical art, picked a name for their movement by opening a dictionary at random. They opened to dada.—French for hobbyhorse.