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Fait Accompli Such is the nature of Duchamp scholarship that at times it's hard to tell the difference between a legitimate investigation of the artist's life and work and the sort of hagiography and trivia-mongering typical of the Net. Tout-Fait (French for readymade), the first online journal of Duchamp studies (www.toutfait.com), is a case in point: Here it's an earth-shattering news item when a notary's stamp on the back of L.H.O.O.Q. proves to be authentic. That's because Tout-Fait is the brainchild of artist Rhonda Roland Shearer and her husband, renowned Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould. They've been creating a ruckus of late by contending that Duchamp fibbed systematically all his life about his readymades, not one of which, they say, was a found, industrially produced object; instead, each was specifically made by Duchamp or at his behest. Likewise, they say, Three Standard Stoppages wasn't made by chance methods but through old-fashioned artistic deliberation. Their contentions have been hard for Duchampians to swallow though if verified would only make his work more complex and fascinating. Probably it's just too hard to admit that generations of scholars were so gullible. Although Tout-Fait "does not subscribe to a single point of view" and the debut issue includes such veteran Duchampians as Craig Adcock, Andre Gervais, Francis Naumann, and Jean Suquet, the journal is dominated by Shearer, who co-authored many of the articles, notes, and news items. And that's why it's important to remember that, sometimes, a notary's stamp is just a notary's stamp. Barry Schwabsky |