Marcel Duchamp

French-American artist (1887–1968), a founder of Dada and Conceptual art, whose "readymades" redefined what could count as a work of art.

By presenting ordinary manufactured objects as art, Duchamp shifted the locus of art from craft to idea, becoming the twentieth century's most influential provocateur of the avant-garde.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Duchamp was a presiding figure of the New York and Black Mountain avant-garde — especially the circle around John Cage — that overlapped with R. Buckminster Fuller's art-world contemporaries. He appears in the corpus alongside Cage as part of the experimental milieu in which Fuller was a fellow traveler, a contemporary of that world of ideas rather than a direct collaborator. His conceptual turn and Fuller's design science mark two very different responses to the same modern question of what art and making are for.

See Also

• John Cage (John Cage) — composer of the avant-garde circle in which Duchamp was central
• We Are All Astronauts (We Are All Astronauts) — catalog of Fuller's twentieth-century art-world context

Sources

• John Cage (source reference) — situates Duchamp in the Cage / avant-garde circle around Fuller