Art in the trash
As printed in The International Herald Tribune September 22, 2004
in the Letters to the Editor
Click here to view the letter as published on the The International Herald Tribune Website.
Why does one need to bow down to the excesses of conceptional art anymore than one should bow down to celebrities (Alan Riding’s "Celebrity and ridicule in Britain’s art world" Sept. 16)? Those who deride the "unenlightened" folks who "don’t get it" and point out that Marcel Duchamp is the inventor of conceptional art often forget to mention that Duchamp’s whole purpose in his "ready made" art was to deride much of what art had become.
Besides, most of Duchamp’s original "ready-mades" were not destroyed by a warehouse fire as were works of the Young British Artists and others recently, but were lost or deteriorated long ago, presumably tossed on the garbage heap like Gustav’s Metzger’s "Recreation of the First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art."
Almost all of his "ready-mades" in museum collections (including the "Bicycle Wheel" in the Pompidou Center) are replicas, marginally or never touched by the hand of the artist.
Duchamp died in 1968. I understand that in 1976 the New York art dealer Xavier Fourcade was selling sets of Italian Duchamp replicas for $25,000 each. Perhaps the Daily Mail should hang on to its replica of Tracy Emin’s tent.
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