July 28 is the birthday of French painter, sculptor, chess player and the mack daddy of Dada MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968).
"Art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion.“
Marcel Duchamp, that sly saboteur of seriousness, spent his life loosening the bolts on Western art until the whole machine rattled delightfully; he was one of the instigators of Dada, the early‑20th‑century anti‑movement that prized absurdity, chance, and a gleeful distrust of cultural solemnity.
Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926) is a whirling little prank of a film, a spinning‑disc hallucination in which optical spirals—his rotoreliefs—twist hypnotically while a series of French puns flicker across the screen, each one a linguistic booby trap designed to collapse sense into nonsense.
Later in life, Duchamp drifted from galleries to the quiet geometry of chess, devoting himself so fully to the game that he competed internationally and claimed it offered a purity of thought no museum could match—a final, elegant gambit from an artist who always preferred the unexpected move. The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City has a wonderful example of his chess art.
I always enjoyhis whimsy