On the Hot Seat: Mike Wallace interviews Marcel Duchamp

Abstract

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) attained fame early in his career due to the succès‐de‐scandale surrounding his painting, Nude Descending the Staircase, No. 2 (1912), when it was exhibited at the 1913 New York Armory Show. Seemingly derisive of all Western aesthetic canons, the work came to embody the general public’s outrage and confusion about modern art, which seemed to them merely a shameless hoax, while it achieved an iconic stature for modern art’s defenders and supporters. Similar polar sentiments persisted in mid‐century. Concurrent with Duchamp’s re‐emergence as an art celebrity, the then new medium of television broadcast art‐based programmes directly targeted at a burgeoning American middle class (mostly white, Eastern, suburbanites), who were themselves fuelling an ever‐expanding and high‐priced art market. With inflated prices, the nagging question was whether consumers were being bilked by the so‐called ‘crook‐and‐swindle’ business of art. In Duchamp’s television interview with Mike Wallace that aired in New York on 18 January 1961, which is transcribed for the first time in English in this article, the ‘crook‐and‐swindle‘ business of art, especially about modern art, takes centre stage, as the artist comments on numerous artists and critics, and reflects on his own artistic production, relationship to the art market and celebrity status.