Duchamp: Audience Has The Last Word
Joe Milutis’s new conceptual project, “Marcel Duchamp’s The [Creative] Act,” was released last month via Gauss PDF. Milutis’s text is a free fourteen-page PDF file that takes Duchamp’s 1957 lecture and turns it into a sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs. Rebecca Bates considers the project: ‘As Marcel Duchamp had it, an artist is nothing without an audience. No work of art — no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians — is a great work until posterity says so. In a 1964 interview between The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins and Duchamp (who is pictured in a five-way portrait from 1917), the latter remarked, “The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word in it.â€
