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BARBARA ROSE
Duchamp's last work, the immensely provocative
Etant Donne"in
the Philadel–
phia Museum of Art. His pose of indifference and idleness to the contrary,
Duchamp spent the last decades of his life neither playing games nor produc–
ing literary commentary, but in the actual labor ofcfeating a material work that
strikes an absolute balance between the cerebral and the sensual-experiential.
This is a balance aspired to, but substantially lacking in the work of his
conceptual followers.
As opposed to the immediate and indiscriminate simultaneous visibility of
published art,
Etant Donne
can never be reproduced or even seen except by one
person at a time, whose eyes must be fixed on the two peep-holes that provide
the only view of Duchamp's astonishing encyclopedic tableau. Because it can
never be moved from its permanent installation in Philadelphia,
Etant Donne
was not part ofthe recent Duchamp retrospective that created the only excite–
ment MOMA has stirred up, outside of its internecine struggles for money and
power, in recent years. Having presented the altogether laudable Duchamp
exhibition, the question is why MOMA felt obliged to assemble an exhibition of
artists dealing in a far less pointed way with a similar range of problems. Are
there no more significant or conceivably previously overlooked artists of stat–
ure or quality less bolstered by external promotion to whom the Museum
might have devoted its precious limited space?
If
not, why not simply show
some part of its vast, distinguished permanent collection not on view? For it is
depressing to compare the quality of
Eight Contemporary Artists
with the stan–
dards previously represented by the Museum ofModern Art; however, quality
is no longer the issue, a point to which we shall return.
Neither an exhibition based on its own extensive reserves nor a show of
older modernists, or even of younger artists working in the traditional media,
however, would have had .the same predictable news value nor the same
insured reception by the art press that created the reputations of
Eight
Contemporary Artists.
Rather than taking any risks, the show was the surest bet
for art world approval or at least attention. In the past, art journals were
content to report on lexhibitions, reviewing the initiative of curatorial taste;
now the situation appears reversed and museums feel compelled to feature the
"stars" created by the media. This is a peculiar inversion, indicating perhaps a
new relationship of the communications media to cultural institutions.
I am in the present context using the term "star" to describe artists
catapulted to eminence through the pages and images of the media, for the
word "star" appropriately characterizes the growth of a cult of personality.
This promotional approach is rapidly replacing earlier criticism that estab–
lished reputations on the basis of comparative quality, or even on the shakier
grounds of significant innovation-the criterion used to justify the elevation of
some reputations in the sixties. As the art world has extended more and more
into the world of business and entertainment, suddenly art is noticeable to a
