Valery Oisteanu
June 2026

Field Notes from an Artist Party

 Marcel, Marcel I Love You to Hell!

 

The vulgarization of the last saint of the avant garde began in full force on the evening of April 30, 2026, at the Museum of Modern Art, with an Artist Party dedicated to Marcel Duchamp. Invitational cards sported a bicycle wheel erected on a stool.  The program included an MD/Rrose Selavy lookalike contest presided over by an emcee wearing a glittering head-barrel and an elaborate costume that could have been featured in a Halloween parade. The participants were mostly subdued when compared to surrealist parties organized by Duchamp himself (and Dali, who for one event wanted to bring a giraffe, but the zoo said “No!” Instead, he brought monkeys and live frogs that jumped from the diner plates). The Rrose Selavy contest prize went to someone with a cane, a fur-collar coat and a hat, vaguely resembling a man with a pipe.

DJ DONIS played techno beat, house music and some new-age disco for a young social crowd enjoying a cash bar. Pop-up performances were choreographed by the late Brian Golden (CEO and producer of the Transformers). The performers in and around the sculpture garden caught my attention when they danced with five toilet plungers, yellow cleaning gloves and wigs above heads covered with see-through women’s tights with holes for the eyes, like bank robbers. The dancers had little to do with MD or 20th century dada or surrealism, except for their occasionally shouting, “Ha ha ha Duchamp! Duchamp!” While in a group formation, like disturbed cheer leaders, running and convulsing from one end of the stage to the other.

As another feature of the MoMA Artist Party, artist Carrie Sijia Wang created a participatory writing activity, turning audience-submitted texts into a living system. For example, in “Index and Remix,” words were deconstructed and reassembled based on their frequency and probability, while a computer program animated an ever-shifting stream of language in which individual voices dissolved into patterns of collective expression. The so-called “Creativity Lab: Make a Portrait,” and a free black-and-white photo-booth were overcrowded, so I decided to skip those.

Finally, the Marcel Duchamp exhibition itself, part of the first such tour in 50 years, included 300 artworks curated by the lead co-curator Ann Temkin and the author of the 340-page catalog. The co-curators were Michelle Kuo and Matthew Affron. All of the revelers escalated to the sixth floor in inebriated anticipation.

At the entrance of the show was a giant portrait of Duchamp with a pipe, multiplied six times, by Man Ray. A door in the photo-wall opened into the exhibit proper, featuring this multiple-personality-disorder artist and chess player extraordinaire, who was an avant god to many generations of artists and lovers of dada and surrealist art.

From the start, the dim light somewhat obscured the brilliant early paintings of Duchamp, who was influenced by his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. These impressionistic and post-impressionistic works were reminiscent of Gauguin or a darker Van Gogh, or even Cézanne, and included several great nudes by the young, horny artist. After a maze of rooms, like the stations of the cross of Golgotha, Duchamp’s output revealed his deep talent, which changed as he morphed from paintings to graphics, cartoons to posters, early pop-culture and on to conceptualism, dada, surrealism and beyond. All in all, the visitors were overwhelmed by too much information.

Duchamp may be called a daddy of zen dada, a cult of spirituality in art that combined zen with anarchy, order with disorder, and yin with yang. Very few artists, including John Cage, Toru Takemitsu, May Wilson and Ray Johnson, achieved such a status in our time. Unfortunately, the shadow of Duchamp’s genius faded with each successive room, and visitors seemed to wander aimlessly with their headphones and cell phones. They barely seemed to comprehend the wall texts and the changes that happened to their perception. The intoxication of multiples of ready-mades, glass paintings and boxes (“boite en valise”), reproduced at infinitum, were a prelude to the commodification of the show’s expensive catalog, related books and a facsimile of the boxes.

“Painting is dead!” Duchamp famously declared sometime in 1923, and for him, retinal art was replaced by art for the mind and the mystical connection between the viewer and the artwork. But this grand message was lost in the rooms sanitized by its curators, who presented the artist’s work like fossils kept under glass in a natural history museum, or like an artist-dinosaur or a reliquary of a dead saint. Mona Lisa with a mustache and a goatee stared blankly at us from a wall. “Air de Paris” was almost invisible in its display.  The 13 readymades, in different sizes, multiplied in each room like the bicycle-wheel mounted on a kitchen stool that did not rotate but sat sadly and lonely on a white pedestal.

The famous suspended snow shovel, originally titled “Prelude to a Broken Arm from MD,” did not bring the color or gravitas necessary to honor a historical icon of Pop Art and Conceptual art. It is exactly contrary to what Duchamp meant when he said, “In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.” When I asked the MoMA-guard if he would turn it for us, he said sternly “No!”

”Why not sneeze Selavy?” Is a bird cage filled with sugar cubes made of white marble, a thermometer and a scuttle fish bone. It is meant to be an assisted ready-made about the absence of a bird in a cage. But here it somehow had become a symbol of the grandiosity of this retrospective, where the anarchistic, surreal, exotic artist himself seemed absent. The spark, the lightning of ideas, of desires, of the “marvelous” all vaporized in a vacuous sound room just before the exit into the bookstore, where the prices were hotter than the meat-locker one just exited.

The sanitized storage from hell of Marcel Duchamp reminds me of the pun that Ray Johnson left after his rebellious suicide: Duchamp without cha-cha is a dump.

In conclusion, Duchamp at MoMA is a valuable asset for art history with some caveats. The stifling presentation and the solemn setting complete with dim lighting and glass cases, turned Duchamp’s playful, transgressive works into “solemn fossils.” The curators decided to arrange the show chronologically, in a rigid timeline that contradicts the chaotic, free-spirited nature of Duchamp’s actual creative anarchy.  I felt the show began very strong but ultimately became repetitive. By the end, the experience felt clean and sterile, lacking the visceral punch expected from such a revolutionary figure.

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Valery Oisteanu is a poet, writer,  artist of the avant-garde born in the USSR, educated in Romania and moved to NYC in ’72’, who has adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy of art and life. Author of 20 books of poety and short fiction, which include PROSTHESIS (Litera Press, Bucharest, 1970); The King of Penguins (Linear Art Press, 2000); In a Blink of the Third Eye with collages by Ruth Oisteanu (Spuyten Duyvil press NYC 2020); Here, There and Nowhere also by (Spuyten Duyvil NYC 2024). Underground of Distorted Memories- Suttertain Des Souvenires  Deformes with a french translation by PIerre Lamarque, poetry and collages by Oisteanu with cover art by Ruth Oisteanu, will be released by La Bage Blanche, Paris 2026. His book of essays The AVANT-GODS is presently in progress. As a freelance art critic, he writes for The Brooklyn Rail, NYArts, Rain Taxi, the Spanish publication art.es, and the Canadian magazine D’Art International.