For at least a century,

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. (Photo by Alfred Steiglitz)

beauty’s most felicitous relationship has been with merchandise, not art. Today, one is more likely to come across something beautiful in a mall or on an online shopping site than in a gallery or museum. Consumer economies run on eye candy and are remarkably good at manufacturing it. The best creative talent is enlisted in the making and marketing of sexy consumer products. The fine arts make do with the unemployable children of the rich.

This was already evident when Duchamp proposed an upturned urinal as an entry in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition. The truly shocking thing about Fountain was not the nomination of a urinal to the status of art but the much-slower-to-sink-in implication that a mass-produced urinal might indeed be as as worthy of aesthetic attention as a Brancusi.

In other words, with hindsight, Duchamp’s gesture appears realistic rather than nihilistic. It acknowledged that modern industry had robbed art of its privileged relationship with the aesthetic. If modern art was to display the beautiful, it was obliged to do so by framing as art what was already readily available as commodity. (For comparison, consider how the products of Frank Stella’s prodigious exertions end up looking like department store bric-a-brac.)

How could the idea of fine art survive Duchamp’s gesture?

There was simply too much cultural and financial capital invested in the idea of art to permit it a graceful exit.  Divorced from service to the sacred, art assumed the burden of serving capital. With the readymade, Duchamp turned art into branding.

This is what the avant-garde ultimately contributed to modernity: a new type of commodity, at once empty and unique and, because of that of potentially unlimited market value.