"The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves"
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Duchamp shifts attention from the object to the mind, insisting that the artist as a thinking being matters more than the products that carry his name. He distrusted the way careers harden into style, and style into a brand, until even the most gifted maker starts echoing himself. What could be new collapses into a set of familiar moves. The result is a marketable signature, but an impoverished inquiry.
His own practice models the alternative. After shocking the Salon with Nude Descending a Staircase, he turned against what he called retinal art, the seduction of the eye. The readymades fight repetition by refusing craft virtuosity altogether. Choosing a urinal, a bottle rack, or a bicycle wheel relocates meaning from fabrication to decision, context, and thought. The important thing is not the object as an accomplishment but the act of selection and the problem it poses: What counts as art, and why? That question, not a line of similar canvases, is the center of his interest.
This attitude also explains his retreat into chess and his sparse production. He preferred to keep his mind mobile rather than become a factory for a recognizable look. It was a critique of the modern art economy as much as of aesthetics. A system that rewards consistency tempts artists to become reliable suppliers of themselves. By looking past the output to the person, Duchamp values curiosity, irony, doubt, and the willingness to sabotage one’s own formula.
The stance connects to his claim that the viewer completes the work. If art lives in a field of ideas and encounters, then the artist’s brain and the spectator’s response matter more than the objects that shuttle between them. The legacy is foundational for conceptual art: originality lies not in novel products but in novel problems. By privileging the individual mind over the oeuvre, Duchamp argues for art as an arena of thinking rather than a stream of things, and he guards the artist against the trap of becoming his own copy.
His own practice models the alternative. After shocking the Salon with Nude Descending a Staircase, he turned against what he called retinal art, the seduction of the eye. The readymades fight repetition by refusing craft virtuosity altogether. Choosing a urinal, a bottle rack, or a bicycle wheel relocates meaning from fabrication to decision, context, and thought. The important thing is not the object as an accomplishment but the act of selection and the problem it poses: What counts as art, and why? That question, not a line of similar canvases, is the center of his interest.
This attitude also explains his retreat into chess and his sparse production. He preferred to keep his mind mobile rather than become a factory for a recognizable look. It was a critique of the modern art economy as much as of aesthetics. A system that rewards consistency tempts artists to become reliable suppliers of themselves. By looking past the output to the person, Duchamp values curiosity, irony, doubt, and the willingness to sabotage one’s own formula.
The stance connects to his claim that the viewer completes the work. If art lives in a field of ideas and encounters, then the artist’s brain and the spectator’s response matter more than the objects that shuttle between them. The legacy is foundational for conceptual art: originality lies not in novel products but in novel problems. By privileging the individual mind over the oeuvre, Duchamp argues for art as an arena of thinking rather than a stream of things, and he guards the artist against the trap of becoming his own copy.
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| Topic | Art |
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