41.

□ I rested, gazing at the ceiling. I had been reminded of Duchamp — the genius of him. Duchamp had been, in my opinion, not just a lord of art, glib, condescending and effortlessly virtuoso — but a great poet, a demonic. Liska had been a huge admirer of his work and his stance, although we had never been able to figure out how he had come about his immense intellectual confidence. How else, if not by some Faustian pact?

Perhaps his madness was a clue.

All Duchamp’s demonic brilliance was compensation for the loss of reality he felt. For Duchamp, art had been mutilated when it had been forced into service as the stuff of bourjoissy pleasure. This traumatic loss of continuity must have pushed open an already willing door into his obsessive genius — and I think that’s why Duchamp appealed to Liska — he was the first of us to realise the falsity of the process and the first to subvert it. Whether we know it or not, all our ideas and ironies were the crumbs from Duchamp’s table, the fallout from his thoughts and actions, every one of which must have been an unholy blow against the world-wide forces of aestheticism.

Nobody else knew what art was for — but they kept on asking Duchamp! — which must have made him madder yet. So Duchamp began to wonder when it was that art became art. Liska argued that a work of art was destroyed when it was sold — that it ceased at that point. This was opposed to the art purchasing view that attributed value to a work of art at the point of purchase, and shifted a certain amount of semantic complexity into place to demonstrate this new discriminate category.

Words = Value as in £1000 per ‘excellent!’

Artists may appear anti-social but all of them would buck their hams to get on in the art market while still aware that at times, they might as well be selling plates of lasagne.

cf. Joseph Beuys : The Rembrandt of Lasagne (1983) Oil paint, acrylic paint, paper collage, glitter, polyester resin, map pins, cooked Italianate tomato and mozzarella lasagne on linen.

Artists, Duchamp realised, have a terrible itch for the praise of fools — and was he not right?