Where does Duchamp stand in the ranks of great modern artists?
Historically and internationally, you’d have to say Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. But certainly Duchamp for breaking a lot of rules and making changes that opened gateways for other artists. How did Duchamp break the boundaries? In some ways it’s difficult to explain because he was an artist’s artist — he did things that people probably didn’t recognise as important for many years. One of his best-known works is the urinal piece Fountain (1917) in which he took an everyday object and said, “I have an idea that this can be art,” which he called Readymade. That really changed the way that a lot of people approached art, and it opened up the idea of art being part of the everyday world. Is that how the question “What is art?”, which had been around for years, became the subject of a much more intense debate, which continues to this day? It really stimulated that question because there was outrage at the time of Duchamp’s Fountain, and the conversation is still going on about what is
