ABSTRACT
Marcel Duchamp believed that the primary concern of the New York School was the manipulation of paint as an end in itself, that is, for purely visual or, as he put it, “retinal” purposes. John Cage’s impact on Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, and others of their generation, such as George Brecht, A1 Hansen, and Dick Higgins, was stronger than Duchamp’s, since all had studied with the composer and knew him personally. Duchamp too loved to poke fun at the high aspirations of artists, their seriousness and obsession with self, the “stink of artists’ egos,” as Johns remarked. Just as Duchamp and Cage repudiated the role of the artist as master, so they rejected the conception of the work of art as masterpiece-for-the-ages, or even an object of special interest. Duchamp’s thinking led in two interconnected directions, both providing alternatives to gestural aesthetics that dominated fifties painting.
