Deer and Elk

Most of the big animals we saw were right by the road.
These mule deer didn't mind grazing beside a big intersection
with lots of tour buses that say "Grand Canyon."

These two deer's ears spread wide because they heard me sneeze as I was
about to take the photo. Why not sneeze?

Just before we left Grand Canyon we took a long and beautiful walk along the rim trail.
An elk walked right onto the trail -- he didn't know the rule about staying 50 feet from people.

Elk near a parking lot in the early evening -- we saw them as we were walking away from where we had dinner.

100 years ago today...

Today is the 100th anniversary of Mona Lisa's return to the Louvre. She was stolen on August 11, 1911, by an employee named Vincenzo Peruggia, who took the painting to Italy. He was eventually found out when he tried to sell it to the Uffizi in Florence.

I have several postcards in my collection from the period when Mona Lisa went missing and no one knew where she was. Here are a couple of them:

"Happy, after 400 years,
To find the key to the outdoors"

"I will come back in a few years
when chickens have teeth."

Marcel Duchamp's famous Mona Lisa parody L.H.O.O.Q., though not published until 1919, was probably inspired by the huge attention to the theft and return. Perhaps the flood of Mona Lisa parodies and appropriations throughout the entire following 100 years owes something to the notorious theft. (Yesterday I blogged about some very recent and not very relevant borrowings.)

Marcel Duchamp: L.H.O.O.Q.

Duchamp revisited by the New Yorker

In today's online New Yorker: this cartoon about "Nude Descending a Staircase." If the toon is really new or quite recent, I'm amazed that the painting still has enough iconic value to talk to people (I can't find its date). Maybe Duchamp's first famous creation has become a natural subject for parody. Like my favorites "American Gothic," Botticelli's Venus, Whistler's Mother, "The Scream," and of course Mona Lisa.

As I've mentioned, I've always been fascinated by the perceived strangeness of "Nude Descending a Staircase," ever since my mother described how astounding it was. At the time, I wrote how it seemed to be a touchstone of the unfamiliarity with modern art of  her generation:

"Working through this personal history with Marcel Duchamp, I begin to wonder if my mother herself knew what the picture looked like -- after all, she was familiar with Picassos and Cezannes. I suspect that she visualized it as much nuder than it was. She always thought that her own acceptance and public permissiveness of nudity in great art was mysterious, as she wouldn't have accepted nudity in any other venue. I now know that "Nude Descending a Staircase" earned its reputation at the Armory Show in 1913, when my mother was three years old, but in her view it seemed more contemporary than that. She reflected the slow pace at which it became somehow mainstream."

Has the strangeness persisted?

A Scratch-and-Sniff Story

"Responsible thing: An energy company sending out scratch-and-sniff cards that smell like natural gas so customers can learn to identify the smell in case of a leak. Unfortunate thing: An entire box of said cards compressed in a garbage truck that then travels through town and makes residents think there’s a widespread gas leak." -- from The Consumerist, 5/8/13

 A gas company employee in Great Falls, Montana, threw away the scratch-and-sniffs because they were expired, but when the garbage truck's compressor processed them, it was like "turning the compressor into a giant finger that scratched all those smelly cards."

"Gas on all floors" -- Paris sign that inspired Marcel Duchamp
See this blog post for details

What people really smelled was a harmless but smelly gas called mercaptan, which gas companies for a long time have added to harmful but odorless natural gas to make sure people can smell it when it leaks.  (The practice started after a build-up of the undetectable gas caused a tragic school explosion in 1937.)

Whether they had been educated by one of the scratch-and-sniffs or otherwise learned to recognize a gas leak, the people in Great Falls recognized the smell so -- "Emergency crews responded to reports of gas smells and evacuated at least six downtown buildings," according to the Great Falls Tribune.

I was surprised that anyone thought it was necessary to ensure that people could recognize the smell of natural gas. I thought the smell was absolutely universal in America where so many homes have a gas line, and occasional bits of odor escape from time to time without consequences -- other than maybe a call to the gas company to check for leaks.  When a person totally loses the sense of smell, a condition called anosmia, the fear of missing a gas leak is one of many terrible reactions to the loss.

My own false alarms about a gas smell have resulted when my hands have absorbed the stinky aroma of garlic during food preparation. Sometimes the odor stays on my hands until the middle of the night, when it's made me think of mercaptan, a thiol (organo-sulfide) with a garlic-like odor. I've talked to other garlic-loving cooks who have experienced this.

A lot of stinky organic chemicals can cause a similar odor. For example, it can also result from algae in seaside ponds. Last May in Santa Barbara I wondered why the beautiful ponds of the Andree Clark Wildlife Refuge near the downtown beaches were absolutely rank-smelling. The rotten-egg-like odor, according to the Santa Barbara Independent, came from an unnatural algae bloom, which arises from time to time in the artificial pond which replaced a natural wetland.

I imagine that everyone has a memory of a gas-leak smell that wasn't a gas leak, but I guess Great Falls is the champion!

Fluxus Feet

"Painting to be stepped on" is the name of this painting, which is displayed unframed on the floor. So I stepped on it, see? "Fluxus" is the name of an art movement from around 50 years ago. To me, it looks as if it's mainly a copy of the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, with the exception of one or two artists who didn't stay only with Fluxus.

Marcel Duchamp's Chess Partner

I'm always fascinated by Marcel Duchamp, who spent years secretly working on art projects while claiming he did nothing but play chess. So of course I liked the reference to him in the N.Y.Times obituary of Andor Lilienthal, Chess Grandmaster, who just died at age 99:

Coffeehouses were natural haunts for many of the best players. In his book, “Chess Was My Life,” Mr. Lilienthal described encounters in 1929 with Mr. Capablanca, in the Café Central in Vienna, and with Mr. Lasker and Alexander Alekhine, the fourth world champion, at the Café König in Berlin in October 1929.

At the Café de la Régence in Paris, once the epicenter of chess in Europe, Mr. Lilienthal regularly played with great players like Savielly Tartakower, but also people better known in other fields, including the artist Marcel Duchamp, who Mr. Lilienthal said was “the most talented French player,” and the composer Sergei Prokofiev, who was of master strength, according to Mr. Lilienthal.

Thanks, Elaine, for the suggestion that I read this.

Well Beyond Dada

One of the Marcel Duchamp mysteries that had occurred to me as I've viewed reissues of his works in museums throughout the world is this: How in the 1960s did he manage to find not one but quite a few urinals of the exact sort that he originally signed R.Mutt for the famous non-judged art show in 1917? The original work, titled "fountain" was rejected and then lost or smashed -- no one knows what actually happened to it. A photograph survived.

I speculated that the chosen object that he elevated to art status was so common that they could still somehow be found in men's rooms of antique vintage. But it seemed ridiculous, even in the light of Duchamp's statement that plumbing was one of America's contributions to the world of art (or something like that).

This article -- illustrated by the photo at right of the original and a reproduction -- has the answer:

“Fountain” was not a coveted art object until well after the second world war, when Duchamp became a cult figure among Pop artists. In response to the art world's desire to see his legendary lavatory, Duchamp authorised curators to purchase urinals in his name in 1950, 1953 and 1963. ... Then in 1964, in association with Arturo Schwarz, a Milan art dealer, historian and collector, the artist made the momentous decision to issue 12 replicas (an edition of eight with four proofs) of his most important ready-mades, including the urinal. ... One of the many ironies of the Schwarz urinals is that they are carefully crafted earthenware sculptures modelled on the Stieglitz photo of the “original”.

The article continues with a discussion of the locations and the mysterious appearances of other signed and unsigned urinal replicas that may or may not be authentic Duchamp remade readymades. Needless to say the concept of authenticity is elusive in this discussion. No surprise: Andy Warhol played a role. All the usual dada antics resurface as I love them to do. The article concludes:

Duchamp's relationship to commerce was not naive. Although he preferred to give away his work rather than sell it, he made a living as an art dealer for many years. Duchamp was also an able chess player who could think a good few moves ahead. One wonders whether the Dada master, who challenged the notion of the authentic artwork, might not be amused by the way these questionable “Fountains” muddy the waters of his current market. “My production,” he once said, “has no right to be speculated upon.”

Duchamp set up the art world and keeps playing tricks long after his death. What a pleasure for a lover of dada. Almost better than his most famous remade readymade, Mona Lisa with a drawn-on mustache. For more see Marcel Duchamp is Relevant.

Marcel Duchamp is Relevant

In the New York Times today: an editorial on conceptual art: "Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?" by Dennis Dutton. Excerpt:

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

...Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

NOW this is probably the last of what I would like to say about Marcel Duchamp. There are hundreds or thousands of web pages and blogs dedicated to him if you want to know more. My posts in sum are:

• What did Marcel Duchamp eat?
• Marcel Duchamp Exhibit
• "Nude Descending a Staircase"
• Bachelor Machines: Duchamp or Da Vinci?
• Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board
• Me, Marcel Duchamp, and L.H.O.O.Q.
• Warhol and Duchamp
• Marcel Duchamp by Irving Penn
• Marcel Duchamp (why not sneeze?)
  
• Marcel Duchamp in Bloomington, IN

Marcel Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder

"Marcel took very little alcohol or food; he would simple eat what was given him. No one gave him a lot because everyone knew he didn't eat very much -- two or three peas and one bit of meat. But he did smoke cigars." (from "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: an Interview" by Moira Roth and William Roth, 1973)

Hmm. Was this one more example of Marcel Duchamp's famous posturing? Or maybe he didn't like to eat American food, having been brought up in early 20th century France. He was indeed very skinny.

I decided to see if there was any connection between Marcel Duchamp and food, as I'm in the habit of thinking food thoughts for my food blog. So this post is more or less on both my blogs today.

The only other Marcel Duchamp-food relationship I can find is the "Chocolate Grinder," which Duchamp remade at least three times, as a readymade (an actual kitchen tool for grinding chocolate, displayed as a work of art), as a painting, and as a sketch. It appeared once on a Dada magazine cover. Duchamp described it as a bachelor machine: "The chocolate of the rollers coming from one knows not where, would deposit itself after grinding as milk chocolate... The bachelor grinds his chocolate himself..." (From The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Sanouillet and Peterson, p. 68)

Marcel Duchamp Exhibit

The Philadelphia art museum has one of the best Marcel Duchamp collections anywhere. Currently they have a special show about him (the link may be only temporary):

Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés

Now Through November 29, 2009

Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic assemblage Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) has been described by the artist Jasper Johns as “the strangest work of art in any museum.” Permanently installed at the Museum since 1969, this three-dimensional environmental tableau offers an unforgettable and untranslatable experience to those who peer through the two small holes in the solid wooden door.

Really interesting review of this exhibit in the L.A.Times: "Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés: The revival of a masterpiece"

"Nude Descending a Staircase"

"The tiresome thing," once said Marcel Duchamp, "was that every time I met someone [in the US] they would say 'Oh! Are you the one who did that painting [Nude descending...]? ' The funniest thing is that for at least thirty or forty years the painting was known, but I wasn't. Nobody knew my name. In the continental American sense of the word, 'Duchamp' meant nothing. There was no connection between the painting and me." Pierre Cabanne, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, p. 45

This quote resonates! I heard of the painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" (right) long before I heard of Marcel Duchamp by name, because it was my mother's prime example of radical and strange modern art; I think she mentioned it often, with incredulity. To lots of people her generation, it was the epitome of what was bad in modern art -- not serious, not beautiful, not realistic, not comprehensible, not awesome, not Art.

Was I intrigued? Maybe. During the time I was growing up and hearing about "Nude...", I am sure that I never saw a reproduction of it -- when I finally found out what it looked like, I think I was disappointed, since it's a relatively typical cubist work, and I had seen Cezannes, Picassos, etc. before it. And I had seen nudes. I had always thought my mother was uncomfortable with some level of nudity in the painting, but it isn't really very nude at all. She had some other problem with it.

Working through this personal history with Marcel Duchamp, I begin to wonder if my mother herself knew what the picture looked like -- after all, she was familiar with Picassos and Cezannes. I suspect that she visualized it as much nuder than it was. She always thought that her own acceptance and public permissiveness of nudity in great art was mysterious, as she wouldn't have accepted nudity in any other venue. I now know that "Nude Descending a Staircase" earned its reputation at the Armory Show in 1913, when my mother was three years old, but in her view it seemed more contemporary than that. She reflected the slow pace at which it became somehow mainstream.

A few years after I was thinking about my mother's generation and Marcel Duchamp's "Nude...", my sister happened to look in an old art book that belonged to our mother. In it, she found a 1964 clipping from the St.Louis Post Dispatch reporting an interview with Marcel Duchamp. He noted the connection between his work and pop art, predicted the demise of pop art, and propagated the myth that he had not done any art work for decades. What’s important is that it demonstrates my mother’s continuing interest in him.

Bachelor Machines: Duchamp or Da Vinci?

Marcel Duchamp, among many other playful artistic endeavors, invented machines that did nothing. He called them "Bachelor Machines." These machines were not functional or practical. When he wrote about them he connected them to the technology in the modern world. One such "machine" was "The Large Glass." It's hard to comprehend exactly what it "did."

Bachelor machines seem to me to be the opposite of readymades like the snow shovel or the bicycle wheel. A readymade originated as something with a purpose, but Marcel Duchamp would select it for some other inner quality that he would intuit or notice -- this was not a physical resemblance, but something more essential. Contrariwise, a bachelor machine looks like a machine but it has no purpose.

I realize that I have a paradigm in my own mind of a bachelor machine. It's what we made as children by setting a tricycle on its seat, and turning the pedals by hand, pretending it was a machine, grinding out some invisible product or substance. My friend Marcel Duchamp would surely have played this game with us.

Leonardo da Vinci also invented machines. They relate to technology in both his world and in ours -- people interpret his never-built, and in some cases technologically fanciful, machines as visionary -- he wanted to invent flying machines centuries before even the first hot-air balloon flight, for example. I have a deep feeling that these too were bachelor machines. In the last 20 or 30 years, I've seen are heard about a number of efforts to manufacture working models: but in fact, they can only sometimes work, and often require modern high-tech materials. His flying machines were mostly unworkable, and totally impractical if made of wood or the heavy metal available in his time. His pulleys may have worked sometimes, especially if they were sketches of working equipment that he observed -- but sometimes he seems to have ignored the weight of the rope that would be needed for a very tall working pulley. Leonardo seems to have been ok at inventing weapons, but I'm not even sure about that.

A Dada moment: Leonardo's famous plan for a bicycle was way ahead of its time but had a rigid frame which thus prevented any means of steering. Many models of it have been displayed in exhibits about his technology sketches. SURPRISE: it turns out the bicycle sketch, "discovered" in 1974, was a 20th century fake. Delicious!

I wonder if people are over-interpreting Leonardo's engineering commitment and expertise. Marcel Duchamp helps me to this thought.

"Duchamp was one of the most Leonardesque of artists," says A. Richard Turner in his book Inventing Leonardo. "Both men held mathematics to be fundamentally important, and both supplemented their art by purely intellectual investigations. Both were vitally interested in process as opposed to product, and took care to record their intellectual processes in annotated form . . .. Finally both were secretive and enigmatic by temperament." (p. 146-7)

Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board

Long ago I bought a postcard at the Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art in Paris. I bought it because of an image of Mona Lisa on it. The title was "Utiliser un Rembrandt comme planche a repasser, Marcel Duchamp" by Daniel Spoerri. I wondered why it was Mona Lisa, not a Rembrandt, on the ironing board (planche a repasser) in the image.

This made me uneasy. I felt that no artist could be ignorant about who painted the Mona Lisa. Then I discovered that I was the ignorant one -- but ignorant of something much more obscure than who painted the Mona Lisa. You see, Marcel Duchamp made notes about various Dada art topics. Once he talked about using a Rembrandt for an ironing board. That obviously inspired the artist, who referred to Duchamp indirectly by the image of Mona Lisa. I applaud this Dada indirection!

Everything was interesting to Marcel Duchamp, as reflected in his readymades, so who knew what he might be thinking about an ironing board. One of my favorites among the less-well-known is his version (maybe versions) of the Parisian sign "Eau et Gaz a tous les Etages," or just "Gaz..." as shown in the photo from a Paris street.

The sign on a Paris building means that there is water and gas service on every floor. When in Paris, I found these placards mysterious, and was told they were there to inform the fire department. They date from the era when not all buildings had water and gas on every floor. Marcel Duchamp suggests that they are absurdities, like so many texts you see on the street.


Once I dreamed that Marcel Duchamp and I were walking along and he said "I am the eau et gaz." At the moment of waking up I had a clear insight: Marcel Duchamp was water! and air! Elemental.

Me, Marcel Duchamp, and L.H.O.O.Q.

Some years ago I wrote a piece called "My Friend Marcel Duchamp." I began by describing why I feel he is my friend. Mainly, he made "L.H.O.O.Q." -- that is, Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. I like Mona Lisa parodies and other playful uses of Art with a capital A. Appreciating and collecting Mona Lisa parodies as I do, L.H.O.O.Q. is a touchstone for my collecting activity. In fact, it may be my first collected item. Whoever makes Mona Lisa parodies is my friend.

In my first dream about Marcel Duchamp all those years ago, I had an insight into this. I was walking with Marcel Duchamp, and discussing an image of Mona Lisa with a mustache. As it happened, the work in question included a color photographic reproduction, not the usual etching that one gets on postcards of the real L.H.O.O.Q. This Mona Lisa reproduction appeared to the right of a larger scene, which I do not remember, and which I had not seen outside my dream. As we walked, Marcel Duchamp explained that he had wanted Mona Lisa to be in this work as a joke, but was afraid that Americans wouldn't recognize it, so he put the mustache on to make sure it would be funny to everyone. I answered yes, it was funny.

Do you get the pun in L.H.O.O.Q? I didn't get it until I read an explanation in a book somewhere. It's a joke on the order of CDB being read childishly as See The Bee, with a picture of a Bee. You pronounce the letters in French and make them into French words: Elle (L) A Chaud (HO) Au (O) Queue (Q), which means "She has a hot piece of tail!" The French have many jokes like this, and the Dadas loved them.

The genre of L.H.O.O.Q. — as invented by Marcel Duchamp — is "Rectified Readymade." A post card, readymade, is rectified by the addition of the beard and mustache. Or in another version published in one of the early Dada chronicles or manifestos, only a mustache. And later, L.H.O.O.Q. Rasee: the "shaved" version, which you could mistake for a simple post card from the Louvre or any tourist shop if you weren't in the know.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, much later in their careers, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the inventors of Dada, later re-made their earlier disposable artworks and readymades, such as L.H.O.O.Q., "In advance of the broken arm," "Why not sneeze," and the famous urinal titled "Fountain by R.Mutt." All is in service of the Dada view of the concept of a masterpiece and of Mona Lisa worship.

Warhol and Duchamp

Quote about the way that Andy Warhol sometimes (or often) had no hands-on interaction with the works of art that he signed and sold:

In this conceptual approach to making art, Warhol inherited the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, an artist he knew, admired, painted, and filmed. Like Duchamp's ready-mades, the ultimate importance of a work by Warhol is not who physically made each object, but the ideas it generates. As the son of immigrants, Warhol in his early works returned again and again to the theme of America itself. What else are the paintings of cheap advertisements for nose jobs and dance lessons concerned with if not the American dream and the price of conformity it exacts? As soon as he'd examined the American obsession with celebrity and glamour in the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, he was quick to show its race riots and electric chair. Unlike Duchamp's, his was a highly public art, one that criss-crossed between high art, popular culture, commerce, and daily life.

From The New York Review of Books, "What Is an Andy Warhol?" by Richard Dorment. To restate this discussion: Warhol asked not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?" Unlike the Dada nature of similar questions in the work of Duchamp, the Warhol question is a legal question because of a lawsuit about exactly which Warhols are authentic Warhols. And the financial self-interest of the foundation that gets to say which is which and trash the losers.

Well, I guess it is Dada. Art. Money. Fun.

Marcel Duchamp by Irving Penn

Indirectly, Marcel Duchamp was also in the news this week in the obituaries of the photographer Irving Penn. Duchamp cultivated a very Dada look, which Penn famously captured.

Marcel Duchamp

I wish I could remember a dream I had a couple of nights ago about "In advance of the broken arm." That's the title of one of Marcel Duchamp's readymades. If you were literal minded, you'd say, it was not a work of art, it's a snow shovel hanging in the museum. Different museums even hang different snow shovels and hang them different ways: from the ceiling, on the wall, high or low... As a museum guard in Philadelphia, home of many Duchamp works, once said to us: "that Marcel Duchamp was a piece of work." I love Dada, brainchild of Marcel Duchamp.

On Tuesday in Bloomington, I found a small collection of Duchamp's remade readymades, which no doubt made me dream of "In advance of the broken arm." The museum also has other works such as "Why Not Sneeze -- Rrose Selavy" (shown above). This work consists of a number of sugar cubes made of marble, along with a few other things inside of a cage. The reason Marcel Duchamp so named the work may be because of the marble sugar cubes. You see, he couldn't use real sugar cubes, because art has to last. So he made them out of marble. Which is cold. And gives you a cold. So why not sneeze? There are lots of other "authoritative" versions of why and what this work is about also, which goes along with his method of creating an identity for himself and his work. Why not sneeze -- a joke no one can get -- captures the spirit of Dada. When asked about it in one case, his reason was "pour compliquer les choses."

Duchamp's early readymades dated from just before the first World War, but he remade them in the 1960s -- with the result that you can see them in many museums. In fact the most famous readymade, "Fountain by R. Mutt," was lost or destroyed after it was first submitted to a supposedly un-judged art show. If you were literal minded, you'd say it was a urinal lying on its side with "R. Mutt" written on it. Don't be literal. When challenged that a urinal displayed on its side was not a work of Art, but was only plumbing, Marcel Duchamp defended R. Mutt, noting that plumbing and bridges were the greatest art created in America. Later, he said none of his works were ever accepted at first.

At one time I did a lot of reading about Marcel Duchamp. In the next few posts, I'm going to rework some of what I wrote down at that time.

Marcel Duchamp in Bloomington, IN

Me and Surrelaism (along with some less egotistical thoughts)

I have always been fond of the surrealists, including André Breton, shown above from an article concerning the current inflated value of his manuscripts. Several news items this week discussed a sale at Sotheby's yesterday of nine of these. All noted the surreal nature of their present high value, which is so at odds with their contents. A French collector, Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the privately-owned Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris, purchased all of these documents for €3.2 million -- around $5 million. I believe that the actual auction price was quite a bit more than predicted, in fact.

Irony, iconoclasm, lack of respect for the conventionally "great," disparaging the tight links between art and money, and nonconformity naturally dominated quite a few of these documents. I love a situation filled with contradictions such as this. It's totally amusing.

I like to think that my Mona Lisa interests and collections are influenced by some of the absurdist approaches to art that originated in the 1920s. I believe that Jean Margat, who invented the term Jocondologie in an important issue of Bizarre (right) was still reflecting some of these ideas in the 1950s.

Besides making art of various sorts, surrealists were taken with the idea of a "manifesto" -- a document that laid out some principles of art and self-expression and usually decried the capitalist use of art and giving it a value in mere money. An early example -- perhaps the first -- is Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, written in 1924, included in yesterday's sale. A comment by Kevin Jackson, from the Guardian: "The true offense [of this sale] lies in the way in which sneaky old capitalism, once again, has so ingeniously taken a movement aimed at its violent destruction and turned it into luxury goods."

And of course the political manifesto is a concept that both preceded and followed the early 20th century art movements. I recently blogged about a related document, from the Futurists, a related art movement of that era. Who could forget The Communist Manifesto from the previous century? Who remembers the S.C.U.M Manifesto by Valerie Solanis, which appeared in the 1960s or 1970s some time. (S.C.U.M. as most people have probably forgotten if they ever knew, stands for "Society for Cutting Up Men" and was an outlier in the Feminist movement, which had other slightly saner manifesto writers among its adherents as well. But I digress from Surrealism.)

From the Independent, dated May 20: "Breton (1896-1966) preached, and practised, an 'instant' approach to art and thought which rejected the conventional idea of enduring value. He might well have rejected as an absurdity the idea of paying an estimated €500,000 (£400,000) for his hand-written and illustrated 21-page argument for 'uncontrolled' art."

Besides the surrealists, I also love Dada, an allied movement (though distinguished profoundly by the theoreticians and manifesto writers). Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, early Dadaists, later re-made their earlier disposable artworks, such as L.H.O.O.Q. or Mona Lisa with a mustache, and the famous urinal titled R.Mutt. In case you are new to this, L.H.O.O.Q. pronounced letter-by-letter in French is an off-color pun, contributing to Dada view of the concept of a masterpiece and of Mona Lisa worship. Just my thing.

After first throwing things away, Duchamp and Ray made sure that museums and galleries had ample works to display. In old age, they changed their minds about money, it seems. Breton may never have done any such thing, but time has done the job.

Just one absurd thing: publication of the many photos of surrealists inspired by news of the sale of Breton's papers show that these extreme non-conformist art experimentalists seemed virtually always to wear a suit and tie. Wow, times change don't they?