Drawing on Art is a wonderful analysis of the impact that Marcel Duchamp has had on the art world. The book of this artist is neither a biography nor a page-by-page display of his work and dates, but an intellectual study of his art and its legacy. The book is beautifully written by Professor Judovitz, who carefully chose images of Duchamp’s oeuvre that best enhance a discussion of his overall thinking. I also wanted to back up my own theory that although the artist himself was a visionary, his so-called heirs are basically ruining the current art scene.

A few years ago, when I was visiting Paris in the early 1990s, I chanced upon being first in line to enter the Louvre museum and for just a handful of minutes, I had the most famous painting in the world, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, to myself. I remember thinking it was the greatest painting I’d ever seen and what has remained with me was how wonderfully the painting had aged, how its browns and its dark setting gave it such a grand feeling of monumentality. I also saw two fantastic exhibitions featuring Pablo Picasso, one displaying selections of his late works at the Centre Pompidou, and the other at the Musee Picasso of preparatory work for his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

What I feel about Duchamp can be brought to light by comparing Picasso and Duchamp and by comparing my reaction to seeing the Mona Lisa and seeing the reproductions of L.H.O.O.Q by Duchamp, where he took a postcard of that painting and drew in facial hair on her most famous face. Before reading Drawing on Art, I had always taken the attitude of L.H.O.O.Q., which Duchamp “drew” in 1919, as something that had to be done. Someone had to take high art down just a notch and give it a nice dose of humor or irony. What Professor Judovitz explains beautifully is that Duchamp’s gesture was, in part, a reaction to the art market’s turn towards commodification as well as a way of taking the pseudo-reverence of the concept of the artistic “genius” down to earth. Further, Drawing on Art discusses ideas by the art essayist/philosopher Walter Benjamin on the effects of mass reproduction of art works on aesthetics in general, relevant to both to the legacy of the Mona Lisa and the statement made by L.H.O.O.Q.

Picasso was rising in the early twentieth century at the same moment as Duchamp. Picasso was a monumental genius whose art, with the advent of Cubism, broadened our notion of what a painting could do and which eventually led to the joys of abstraction. Seeing his drawings at the Musee Picasso helped me realize how he would represent figures simultaneously from several vantage points, a radical concept at the time of his constructions. In Picasso’s late paintings, which I saw at the Centre Pompidou, were works based on the motifs and paintings of Rembrandt. Here was the twentieth century master, Picasso, paying homage to a great Dutch forebearer from the seventeenth century.

Duchamp was as radical as Picasso. He exploded on the scene with his “readymades”, such as a bicycle wheel upside down, or a urinal, straight from the factory and plumped on a pedestal for our viewing pleasure. As astonishing as it is to think of Picasso’s Cubist revolution, I marvel at the fact that Duchamp could have radicalized art at such an early time in this way. Drawing on Art explains the intellectual depth of the readymades and how Duchamp saw the need to both attack the concept of art being a purely visual experience and to move from the “ocular to optics.” His was a critique of the “seduction of the retina” and Judovitz notes this as extending to the notion of and reaction against “visual consumption by the public” and art as commodity.

Picasso once said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” But in doing so, and by revolutionizing painting, Picasso’s reaction against the purely visual still left art and painting as genres in themselves. The paintings that he made in Rembrandt’s shadow were respectful of the history of art. I can’t in any way see that respect emanating from Duchamp, especially in light of his defacement of the Mona Lisa. Duchamp’s need to take away visual pleasure and stimulation in painting has left the art world with…basically nothing. Picasso’s genius led to a few flourishing decades of reaction, culminating in Abstract Expressionism. But just as the strangeness of Mannerism followed the imposing genius of Michelangelo and his high Renaissance art, the readymades keep the modern art scene in a state of disarray, and what they call “irony” one can just term “ridiculous” and most often, “tasteless.” Artists currently seem to be saying that beauty has to be removed from art. Judovitz denies that Duchamp is the “end of art” but sees him as “anartistic.”

Can we truly blame Duchamp for the terrible state of the current art scene? In Drawing on Art, the author included extended quotes by him; I was enthralled by his every word. His genius and uniqueness cannot be denied. I believe that Duchamp remained true to what he believed and lived his life in accordance with his “anartistic” views. While reading Drawing on Art, I visited the Museum of Modern Art and saw Duchamp’s Fresh Widow in the permanent collection. I was alarmed at the feeling of morbidity that it invoked. It is interesting that Duchamp eventually fled the art world to enjoy the intellectual life of playing chess. A friend of mine who blogs for The New Yorker on film, Richard Brody, recently made an observation on chess and adolescence: “Chess is a closed and perfect world with a clearly defined and finite set of rules—the opposite of life, and for those who become devoted to it, a substitute for life…” Duchamp substituted a life in art for chess and his ready-mades replaced the beauty of visual art with a destructive irony. Hopefully, something will someday emerge from the ashes for art to once again reign supreme.

Natural Selections interviews the author Dalia Judovitz, NEH Professor of French, Emory University:

1) BL: The idea that Marcel Duchamp’s work reflects his reaction to the commodification of art was a fascinating theme of your book. But why did this have to be tied to a destruction of the visual necessities of viewing art? Why can’t looking at paintings be seen as a conduit to intellectual, mental, cerebral reactions?

DA: Duchamp’s critique of art represents his attempt to question and disrupt the reduction of both the production and the consumption of the work of art to purely visual experiences. In so doing, he was reacting against art movements such as Cubism who sought to innovate painting solely through the abstraction of visual forms, and also against the rising market and institutional forces which were impacting art, akin to forms of commercial consumption. In response, Duchamp moved away from a purely visual understanding of art by expanding art to include poetic, intellectual or conceptual dimensions that would enlarge its meaning. His gesture built on Leonardo’s claims that painting is a mental thing. Duchamp’s playful and irreverent appropriation of Mona Lisa recognized his conceptual debt to Leonardo, at the same time mocking its visual appearance or “look.” Likewise, The Large Glass (called delay in glass) can be interpreted as a work that attempts to slow and delay the immediacy of visual consumption through verbal/poetic and conceptual considerations that reveal its construction. Duchamp tried to counter the visual seduction of painting by deliberately and actively introducing intellectual considerations into both the production and consumption of artworks.

2) BL: How would you react to the statement that perhaps Marcel Duchamp did not lead to the end of art, but the end of “good art”?

DAJ: Duchamp’s work has been interpreted by some as bringing about the end of art, whereas I (and De Duve) would argue that he made visible art’s conditions of possibility, that is, the specific, historical, social and cultural conditions that determine its manifestations. I don’t believe that Duchamp’s interventions are either negative or nihilistic: he explained repeatedly that he is not interested in the idea of attacking or negating art (because in doing so he would be simply re-affirming its conventional meaning). Rather he was fascinated by the impossibility of defining art, since each historical moment has its own understanding. The ready-mades, for instance, “draw” on the ideals of representational painting, but do so humorously and poetically by giving us the object and its title rather than its artistic/ visual rendering. As Duchamp appears to move beyond painting he does not in fact bring art to an end, since his works derive their conceptual and poetic impetus from various ideas of art. To use chess terms, he did not win or lose the game, but managed to bring the game to a “draw.” The ready-made is not “bad” art, because its meaning is derived from and fueled by its interplay with the conventions of painting; it is “anartistic” rather than anti-art. Duchamp was interested in recovering the archaic, sanskrit meaning of art as “making,” which would bring the activities of the artist in line with other forms of making such as exercised by engineers and even businessmen. He described himself as “an engineer of lost time.” He was less concerned with making judgments about art than discovering and exploring the nature of creativity as an interactive and collaborative act. To me, his explorations of creativity, like Leonardo, enable him to bring together the apparently disparate realms of the arts and the sciences.

3) BL: In terms of Duchamp’s work leading to the participation of the viewer as equal an entity to the artist and the diminishing of the idea of the artist as a savant, genius, etc… what does this do to the concept of “talent?” Didn’t the viewer always participate, but in different ways? For example, weren’t the sculptures on the cathedrals of France meant to educate and draw in the viewers in the Middle Ages?

DA: Duchamp’s efforts to revalorize the position of the spectator were based on his efforts to “de-defy” the artist, which he felt was a relatively new development. He noted that earlier conceptions of the artist recognized the labor of artistic production (its artisanal character) and its collaborative nature (workshops, etc.). His activation of spectatorship reflects the recognition that a work’s meaning does not lie solely in its author, as individual source, but also in its consumption by the spectator or posterity. By diminishing the idea of the artist as genius he was not undermining the idea of “talent” but rather redefining art as interactive and collaborative, where consumption and production are brought together through appropriation. Reflecting the influence of T. S. Eliot, “talent” would imply an understanding of the tradition of what has already been done and also the possibilities that chance opens up, in order to produce something new. Duchamp moved away from the idealized notion of creation to a notion of artistic production whose logic is appropriative and reproductive, or as Man Ray noted: “To create is divine. To reproduce is human.”