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FOOTNOTES


(1) Rudolf Herz's Zugzwang was installed at the Ruhr Kunstverein in 1995. Kuspit's remarks were made in a discussion that followed a session on Art and the Holocaust that was part of the Annual Conference of the College Art Association held in February 2000 at the Hilton Hotel in New York; for a transcription of his comments, see Elliot Barowitz, Tout Fait. I am grateful to Mr. Barowitz for having drawn these comments to my attention.

(2) Donald Kuspit, "The End of Creative Imagination," New Art Examiner, vol. 20, no. 4 [May 1993], pp. 16-19, it is from this article that the quotations contained in this paragraph were taken).

(3) "Letters," New Art Examiner, vol. 21, no. 1 (September 1993), p. 3. Kuspit's letter came in response to a criticism of his article on Duchamp (see previous note).

(4) "A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast," Arts and Decoration, vol. 5 (September 1915), p. 442.

(5) Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (Ghent: Ludion Press; distributed by Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1999), p. 42. When Duchamp was asked why he stopped painting, he explained that it was only because he was no longer interested in "rubbing elbows with artists," but because of a specific incident: the withdrawal of his Nude, an event, he said, that "gave me a turn." He found the actions of his cubist colleagues "naively foolish..." and he was basically reacting "against such behavior coming from artists whom I had believed to be free" (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. by Ron Padgett [New York: Viking Press, 1967], p. 17).

(6) "The Art of Assemblage," symposium moderated by William C. Seitz, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 1961; see Joseph Ruzicka, ed., "Transcript of the Symposium," in John Elderfield, ed., Essays on Assemblage, Studies in Modern Art, vol. 2 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 150.

(7) Beatrice Wood, "Marcel M. Naumann and Rudolf E. Kuenzli, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 13. Years later, however, Duchamp did establish a theory about an artist was only a "mediumistic being," that the work of art was only "completed" by a spectator (see "The Creative Act," Artnews, vol. 56, no. 4 [June 1957], pp. 28-29).

(8) Steinberg has been quoted as having said something similar in his classes and lectures for years, but only recently has he published the comment under his own name, see Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture), (Houston: The Menil Collection/Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 15.

(9) Donald Kuspit, "Report from New York: New York Dada in Retrospect," Art New England (April/May 1997), p. 11.

(10) Donald Kuspit, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 224-25, n6.