Today, one calls it art, dignified as conceptual art, and he went along with the retrospective transformation of his work without complaints. He could find no response possible to the end of Dada and the birth of our museum space. In Duchamp's hands, hypothetical art grew fluid enough to chart historical changes while accepting the power of an artist's gesture. The notion of fiction suggests another undercurrent of Modernism, an exploration of the human. That humanity corresponds to Modernism's turning of nature inward, from eternal truth to patterns of the mind.
Postmodernism only confirms the old prejudice.
Today, one sees even raw perception as colored by cultural limits and human understanding. Perhaps the museum is not quite so happy after all. Faced with the Y2K, it looks back instead at the start of the previous century. Like an adult dealing with recovered memories, it is obsessed with its roots. Like a badly corrupted computer, it resets to 1900 or, as with Windows programs and Modernism's critical orthodoxy, to 1980.