Just Art It

Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (Portrait multiple de Marcel Duchamp), Broadway Photo Shop, New York City, 21 June 1917. Public Domain / Wikipedia.A big Marcel Duchamp retrospective has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art, and that means we can look forward to lots of fresh writing and thinking about Duchamp’s work.Or at least I hope that’s the case: I’m very pro-Duchamp and always happy to learn more about one of my favorite tricksters. I take it as a good sign that Times critic Holland Carter has already used the exhibition as an excuse to pronounce Duchamp more influential than Picasso! (Or, for a different take, here’s a critic wondering if we’ve become too reverent of the irreverent Duchamp.)But so far the most pleasing response I’ve encountered is this piece (also in The Times) by Blake Gopnik, with this key passage:Duchamp helps us understand that “art” shouldn’t be thought of as a noun that picks out certain kinds of objects, but as a verb: We “art” absolutely any…