ArtsArenaPLUS members are invited to hear Georges Helft speak about this provocative artist at the home of Arts Arena director Margery Arent Safir, followed by a cocktail dînatoire.
Marcel Duchamp, French and American, was one of the giants who revolutionized 20th-century art, questioning even what constitutes a work of art. Yet no solo exhibition of his work had ever been seen in Latin America until, in 2008, Franco-Argentine international collector Georges Helft conceived of and co-directed the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: a work that is not a work of “art.” It took place at the Fundación Proa in Buenos Aries, Helft’s Argentine home, home also to Marcel Duchamp in 1918 as he fled war in Europe.
“Duchamp realized that the spectator has a colossal importance and power in determining what is and what is not ‘art,’” Mr. Helft has been quoted as saying, “a thought that fascinated me because it is a thought that [Jorge Luis] Borges also had when he said that the reader makes a book, not the writer. ‘I’m a reader,’ Borges insisted, and Duchamp says that the work is made by the one who looks at it, by the spectator.”