The Duchampian Myth

Marcel Duchamp

The Failed Messiah

by Wayne Andersen

Editions Fabriart, 400 pp., $45

Wayne Andersen’s new biography of Marcel Duchamp is a journey into darkness, and a successful effort to expose and pop the bubbles that were Duchamp and the postmodern art world he created. Already on the title page, he warns the reader of what lies ahead:

This book was written for mature readers at an adult age and contains words and expressions that are suppressed as obscene wherever English or French is spoken and also includes quotations . . . that are pornographic.

On the first page of his introduction he lets us know what he thinks of the artist and his legacy: “Duchamp’s gift to artists was comparable to the Marquis de Sade’s gift to sadists—relief from formal restraints, accountability, guilt, and shame.” And on the first page of the prologue, Andersen introduces the reader to the powerful gatekeepers of the postmodern art world, the men and women who collectively unleashed Duchamp on the 20th century. Citing a December 2004 editorial from the Guardian Weekly that proclaimed “Urinal Comes Out on Top,” he reports a survey of 500 international artists, critics, curators, and art dealers, who confirmed that Duchamp’s urinal, named “Fountain,” still remained at the end of the 20th century what it had been at its beginning: “The world’s most influential piece of modern art.” Having fully warned, but not completely armored, his readers for what lies ahead, Andersen promises to give them the book-ride of their collective lives: