The chapter on Marcel Duchamp, from The Bride & the Bastards, highlights on the movement away from established norms of art that Duchamp refers to as “retinal art”. Retinal art, as Duchamp describes, was the art which was solely based on pleasing images, that evoke nothing more than the image itself, also referred to as “olfactory art”. Duchamp consciously steered in opposition this “Anti-intellectual” art accepted by the impressionists of his time and before. Duchamp’s art, and his surrounding theories were rooted in the ideas that the artist and the spectator, together, work in the “game” that is called art. According to Duchamp, the artist, rather than being the creator of meaning, standing above the viewer at a higher level of understanding, was simply the one who created the object (whether meaning was implied, or not), whereas the spectator took responsibility for the interpretation and assigning of meaning. Whereas many artists were made “uncomfortable” by this notion, as it implies a lack of control of meaning, a whole movement spun off of these ideas, resulting in an influx of almost cult-like “Duchamp-ians”. Personally, I love the lack of seriousness tied to this train-of-thought and practice, often poking fun at the consumer-based bourgeoisie,, while simultaneously producing the evolution of other forms of art that I very much enjoy, like pop-art.
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