He did this as a sort of "performance" art piece...Yes, he raised a lot of cash, he went to Monte Carlo and with his "system", he made money for himself and his investors and the bonds themselves became pieces of very expensive, coveted art. In the retrospective luxury of history (I mean we have lived through a few stock market crashes and world financial crisis and seen the value of the work of conceptual artists such as Damien Hirst crash through the stratosphere of your pathetic imaginations), could we dare to deny that he was a genius?
4 comments:
Marcel Duchamp is one of my main art heroes too and he certainly was a genius.
Thanx for posting the story!
after this episode, he was able to leave France and live in Argentina as a French teacher and chess master for a few years...
There is the entire history of his life in New York City as the editor of New York DaDa...
I always felt that his life contained many different episodes, each of which could be separate movie...
His scam during the German occupation of France which allowed him to smuggle the work of artists to America as "Cheese".
Marcel Duchamp - Failed Messiah - Amazon
I read the premise of the book and I have to say that the author is taking a point that might just be a purposely intellectual controversial contrarian argument...
On one hand, all of his claims might be true but on the other hand, the faults he attributes to Duchamp are only an aspect of a personality. Inarguably, Duchamp profoundly altered the way we think about art.
I would love to read the work, though.
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