The lazy art. How Marcel Duchamp converted ordinary objects into multi-million pieces for sale
A prime example of the early generation of art tricksters of the 20th century.
The early 20th century was a period when the perception of art and painting changed dramatically, and in fairness, it changed for the worse. The craft was not the decisive factor anymore. Suddenly, everyone could become an artist and without much effort, create paintings or simple objects that would cost millions in less than a hundred years later.
Being anti-academic became cool. Lazy art and trash art became relevant and were perceived as avant-garde. The revolutionary mindset, inspired by all the bloody events and World War I going on, saw a radical change in comparison to the one that was present in the 19th century when Romanticism was born. Artists, like Caspar David Friedrich, viewed the human figure as a small piece in the environment, surrounded by majestic nature and its forces. The ones that felt these revolutionary vibes in the 20th century simply said: “I can display an ordinary urinal as a piece of art because I CAN”.
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The aesthetics did not matter anymore for people, like Frenchman Marcel Duchamp, who was one of the key figures in the development of such movements, as Dada and Cubism. His views on art were: “The idea is more important in the art creation than the material. Everything that artist considers art is an art by definition”. Do you feel the arrogance in the last sentence?
It is what Duchamp and his likes were all about. You don’t need to spend thousands of hours perfecting your craft, or years exploring and learning about all the periods of Western art history. Waste of time! Just put some random object on display, convince the audience that a great and powerful idea is hidden behind it, and voila! You’re the artist now. Craft does not matter anymore. That generation presented the world with a bunch of great tricksters, but it is hard to call them artists.
Just imagine disrespecting the craft of the artist, putting Duchamp’s name alongside Jean-Honore Fragonard, Hans Gude, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, or Gian Lorenzo Bernini. You can add thousands of great names alongside these great and skilled masters. But to add the creator of Readymades to this list as an equal? Blasphemy.
However, Duchamp was a great trickster, and his idea eventually worked out well. He sought to provoke the academic standards and create controversy — and he achieved it. Just imagine all the buzz when Duchamp presented his Fountain at the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Is this an art? This question soon arose, and there were plenty of people who rejected such a primitive approach to the perception of art. Of course, there were also those who got caught in Duchamp’s philosophy of artists deciding what art is.
The Fountain was one of the Readymades of Duchamp. In 1919, the Frenchman came up with another idea — to improve the portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa by drawing a mustache and beard in pencil and appending its title. This series of remakes was named L.H.O.O.Q., but with this idea, Duchamp proved the worthiness of his Readymades. He simply took the satire Mona Lisa smoking a pipe, published by Eugene Bataille back in 1887, and added his touch. Almost a century later, some art collector bought one of the versions of L.H.O.O.Q. for $750 000 at Sotheby’s auction in Paris. Considering the effort Duchamp put into this work — this looks like a weird investment.
The meaning of L.H.O.O.Q. was unclear, and there were various speculations about it, but in one of the interviews, Duchamp explained the translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as there is fire down below.
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Yet, this is far from the most expensive thing Duchamp created. One of the versions of his Fountain was sold for $1.7 million, and his Readymade Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette got a buyer, who was ready to give away $11.5 million for a bottle of perfume with a label modified by the Frenchman. Another quick manipulation, and here you get a multimillion transaction 90 years later.
Nevertheless, the money spent on the auctions does not automatically mean that these objects should be considered valuable artworks or considered to be art at all. The monetary aspect kind of helped to damage the value of art. Duchamp’s philosophy simply met rich people with the same mindset: “I can spend millions on a weird thing because I CAN”. Do not get misled by the price tag. Rich people generally are ready to overpay everything. They can eat the same piece of meat you eat, but they will do that in some fancy restaurant and spend $2500 instead of $20. They will wear some branded clothes worth thousands of dollars that actually have the same cost of production as your $5 T-Shirt. That’s the mindset of “I CAN because I CAN”.
It is why Marcel Duchamp does not really deserve the name of the artist applied to him. For centuries, art was a form of aesthetical pleasure. A celebration of beauty and emotion. The 20th century and all these contemporary art movements turned art into a celebration of weirdness. The weirder it looks, the better it is. Who cares about the craft anyway? And that’s the sad part. Those were just a bunch of snobs, spending their time in a bohemian environment among other snobs, too lazy to actually invest their time into developing their skills.
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