As in so many other designs of the human being, art is the search for perfection, although never obtaining it. For a good reason: reaching perfection means certain death, the beginning of an unstoppable decline, as happened with painting towards the middle of the 19th century.
Even before the irruption of photography, the techniques used by painters had reached such a high level of sophistication that, in order to continue trying to exceed the limits, the only thing left for the most impetuous were to go off on tangents in order to get away from the maelstrom of suffocating mediocrity that threatened to devour them all in one bite.
Suddenly what counted was not to reproduce with astonishing accuracy what the artist had in front of him, be it a passage, a duchess, a bunch of asparagus or a cathedral, but rather to interpret what he saw in his own way. Of course, the results of such daring experiments turned out to be incomprehensible to most of the uninitiated. But despite fiery adverse criticism, scandals that left their mark, and even violent protests, the craziest painters stuck to their guns, not giving a damn about popular opinion or that of their detractors. The case of Van Gogh is well known: his recognition and fame were only granted posthumously.
However, neither Cezanne, nor Braque, nor Picasso, nor Kandinsky abandoned the canvas - at least not as far as painting is concerned - to capture their creations. But once this artistic revolution was set in motion, it would inevitably pass through abstraction, but without ever leaving the confines of the painting, with or without a frame.
But then unexpectedly burst onto the scene an unknown skinny Norman artist, who with a minimum gesture, like someone who does not want the thing, blew up the foundations of all the academies of fine arts in the entire world, and achieved such a feat by delivering to a collective art exhibition held in New York in 1917 of “Fountain”, which was nothing more than an earthenware urinal identical to thousands of others taken from the production line of a New York factory.
It would soon be known that it was a ready-made, any industrial object converted into a work of art by the express will of the artist. And the invention stuck. Well, he did, but besides being intelligent, Duchamp was very smart and although he could have flooded the market with ready-mades, he never abused his power. It was enough for him to be the first.
The suspicion that contemporary art was nothing more than a tease perpetrated by talentless scoundrels wanting to annoy was widespread from the outset. And it was like that even after the war, when the world capital of art had moved from Paris to New York and abstract expressionism was leading the way, albeit with the invaluable help of the CIA.
In 1949 a seminar on modern art was held in San Francisco. For most of the brainy speakers, among whom the architect Frank Lloyd Wright stood out, it was nothing more than a huge fraud, the work of "communists" or, in the words of President Truman, "the nonsense of a bunch of absurd and absurd people." lazy”. He was even branded as degenerate art, a blatant example of the self-destructive degeneration of modernity.
One of the speakers who did not agree with this full-fledged attack on the new artistic currents was Marcel Duchamp, who spoke to them about his concept of "aesthetic echo", which stated that works of art cannot be understood through the intellect, as nor can their effect be conveyed by words. Caramba.
Duchamp was not only brave on that occasion, but he always was. Brave and consistent; lonely and cool; generous and restrained. Those who have wanted to imitate him have been legion; all have failed, each in his own way. It is useless to search for words to explain it. La Gioconda wears mustaches; Duchamp smiles.
