Marcel Duchamp, Reactionary? A MoMA Retrospective Exposes The Radical Artist’s Bourgeois Yearnings

Jonathon Keats | Forbes | 11th May 2026

Amidst the hoopla around the Duchamp retrospective in New York, a fiercely contrarian view. Duchamp’s “singular” contribution to art history was the “readymade” – quotidian items that he declared to be art. While they challenged the establishment’s narrow definition of could be considered art, readymades didn’t really change anything. Duchamp merely created a new set of things for museums to collect, things that he himself was only too happy to supply.