We picked up a pretty cool book last weekend at the Friends of the Library Sale–Pierre Cabbanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is way more straightforward than you would think, and also quite funny. He’s also, as his work would attest, often reflective and philosophical. Here, he waxes heavy on art, beauty, transience, and mediocrity:
I think painting dies, you understand. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. Sculpture also dies. This is my own little hobbyhorse, which no one accepts, but I don’t mind. I think a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterward it’s called the history of art. There’s a huge difference between a Monet today, which is black as anything, and a Monet sixty or eighty years ago, when it was brilliant, when it was made. Now it has entered history–it’s accepted as that, and anyway that’s fine, because that has nothing to do with what it is. Men are mortal, pictures too.
The history of art is something very different from aesthetics. For me, the history of art is what remains of an epoch in a museum, but it’s not necessarily the best of that epoch, because the beautiful things have disappeared–the public didn’t want to keep them. But this is philosophy…
So, I guess all those urinals Duchamp made aren’t so fresh today.
Biblioklept 
I am in the middle of 2666, and am right on the part in the second section where the main character is sort of performing his own Duchamp piece with the book on the clothes line. The story behind it made me smile and think how great a guy Duchamp must have been to hang around with. I bet he was a blast. Makes me want to read this book you’ve found.
One thing about freshness though — it is possible that with some pieces, those that can be created simply by following the artist’s directions (sort of what’s happening in 2666), the freshness is reignited each time that work is created anew.
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I actually looked for something about the book installation in the Duchamp book, but, no luck…
For the record, I actually disagree with Duchamp’s “own little hobbyhorse” here. I think he’s railing against institutionalized art, historicized art, what have you…making a case for context, context, context. Still, to riff of another painter alluded to in 2666–Arcimboldi: His paintings, I think, are alive, not dead, still worthwhile. I think (unlike many of Duchamp’s playful installations) that they need no context (social, historical, or otherwise) to be appreciated, enjoyed, whatever. For me, it’s hard to believe that a Goya or an Arcimboldi or a Bosch or a Bruegel is only “alive” today because it represents a generalized mediocrity of an age.
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