post duchampism?

Post Duchamp Phily.

Owens Rhetoric is mobile today, enjoying Philadelphia free wireless. We're here to spend the holiday weekend with the greek vase expert of the family. I heard faint echoes of our conversations below as I walked down Chestnut Street.

Via slowens, I've learned today of the work of "Banksy." From Reuters:

A British graffiti artist who goes by the name "Banksy" went one step further, by smuggling in his own picture of a soup can and hanging it on a wall, where it stayed for more than three days earlier this month before anybody noticed.

The prank was part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate four of New York's top museums on a single day.

The largest piece, which he smuggled into the Brooklyn Museum, was a 2 foot by 1.5 foot (61cm by 46 cm) oil painting of a colonial-era admiral, to which the artist had added a can of spray paint in his hand and anti-war graffiti in the background.

The other two targets were the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, where he hung a glass-encased beetle with fighter jet wings and missiles attached to its body -- another comment on war, Banksy told Reuters on Thursday.

It seems appropriate that I am near the resting place of Marcel Duchamp's final work; for, it would seem, Banksy has moved us into post-Duchampism. If the former chess king reckoned that art is what a museum chooses to display, Banksy has put the artist back into an active role- art is what the artist achieves placing into the museum. Down with curators! Given, the art gallery is still pre-eminent. What does this say about our attachment, ancient as it is, to that institution?