Making Sense of Marcel

For my money Duchamp is one of the most important artists of the modern era, one of the funniest, and most certainly one of the most misunderstood (followed closely by Pollock and Warhol). Regardless of the fact that his legend has generated a raft of reductivist, mindless art babble, there's no question that the man's work is indispensable.

Even today these works seem retinal, vital and human. They're also far removed from the type of work we see today which lays claim to his legacy, much of which fits too-neatly into the rubric of "art for blind people."

Now we have the wonderful web site Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, a timeline-based Flash site which provides something of a legend for the Legend. This site is great for both appreciators and detractors alike. Here's a quote from the site:

Bicycle Wheel was the first of a class of objects that Duchamp called his "readymades." He created twenty-one of them, all between 1915 and 1923. The readymades are a varied collection of items, but there are several ideas that unite them.

The readymades are experiments in provocation, the products of a conscious effort to break every rule of the artistic tradition. in order to create a new kind of art -- one that engages the mind instead of the eye, in ways that provoke the observer to participate and think.

Don't be a hater!