Who among the angels

Body
Rilke knew the angels weren't listening though he made off like it was just the confusion between who is living and who is dead. I remember the line in the movie Dracula where Bela Lugosi says "To be really dead that must be wonderful." And the Greeks also felt like getting out of this world was most likely the best outcome, getting back to the state of affairs before being born. Because the world is not a very nice place yes because for most of us this life contains a lot of suffering and only moments of joy. Of course the world was more perilous in the great age of the Greeks. It was a very temporary existence at best, and minus most all of the technology we possess now, boats were very much at the center of things. And the Greek gods were many and the empire such as it was had a brief and shining moment which was lost in war, long pointless war.
 When I met Kathy Halbreich at the Walker Art Center her curator Elizabeth Armstrong was putting together a Duchamp exhibition and the conversation was about Duchamp's late reception and in general about artists who are found by the art world later in their lives. Duchamp had a lot of attention in Europe in his youth as a Dada artist and as a member of the advanced guard of his age then later in America he was brought to wider attention in the 1960's as Pop and conceptual art became dominant modes of production. When Walker Hopps did a small retrospective of Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum Duchamp was quite an old gentleman. The thing was his influence was enormous and influence is as important to an artist as the actual work surviving. Apelles the most famous Greek painter of the classical age is more stories than paintings, nothing of his great work has survived but he becomes immortal in the eyes of the poets and philosophers who tell the tale of this amazing painter. Duchamp lost a lot his work along life's way, some of the readymades were just lost undervalued because they were common objects like snowshovels and bicyclewheels. In the mid-60's photographs of these readymades served as models for new versions of the work made by engineers trying to reproduce these common objects for a new market that would buy them as small edition multiples. These replicas are now bringing huge prices at auction when they are up for sale. In most ways every artist has a late reception unless they are like Picasso and become the apple of many eyes early on, the late reception is something to do with many factors. Chief among these reasons is the competitive nature of contemporary art and the cultural love of novelty. Things move so fast in our art world that very good art can be left behind in the dust.  Duchamp was lucky that the world became more receptive to his art before he died. Sometimes living a long while can make your work more desirable as one's influence begins to manefest itself. Pop art was an amazing opening, in most ways pop was the first really conceptual art and Duchamp benefited from art becoming more intellectual and more linguistic. The move away from cubist inspired abstraction  and later the fatigue in abstract expressionism opened the field for other modes of contemporary art.  more later-