Brushing my teeth with Duchamp.

This morning, I was standing brushing my teeth, looking at two sliding, frosted-pane windows, a gap between them showing a verdant scene of ferns and redwoods beyond. And I thought how nice that would be as a painting, the whole thing: the glass windows and the small sliver of the natural world. In my imagination, I entered the world of the figurative painters, who find ways to narrate and to depict. What happened? What was Duchamp's purpose of art? The oft-repeated story is that Duchamp came along and radically re-oriented the art world (over the course of the century) from viewing/experiencing pleasure to intellectual rigor and questioning, which led to our contemporary interest in conceptual art. Sometimes, the two go together, which only confuses things. After all, his signed urinal was a pleasant, smooth form, especially by today's standards. But then: he did end up quitting art entirely and playing chess in his old age, turning himself into the statement of denial, his everydayness his artwork. Or perhaps he was just escaping the gravitational pull of the famous artist myth, escaping the pressure to do one thing better always until the world burns down.