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Arts Intel Report

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919.

Oct 10, 2026 – Jan 31, 2027
2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, PA 19130, United States

“If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved,” the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp explained. “Bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.” To fight the good fight, Duchamp championed the readymade, an approach that culminated in Fountain, the infamous urinal from 1917—you know the one—signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.” Duchamp never stopped reinventing himself. In 1935, for instance, he created his “portable museum,” a suitcase-size retrospective replicating his life’s work in miniature. More than 300 works come together in “Marcel Duchamp,” an exhibition that originally opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It traces a career built on contradiction. As the artist himself put it, “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” —Elena Clavarino

Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art