Larry Gagosian Talks Duchamp, Sushi—and Gives a First Look at the Top Secret New Gagosian Gallery in New York

Gagosian could have gone with a splashy primary market show, featuring wet paint from one of his hottest living artists. Instead for the inaugural outing, the gallery is showcasing the big bang of conceptual art—to honor his spiritual 980 neighbor, he’s doing a Duchamp show. The timing could not be better, as earlier this month a mind-bending survey of Duchamp’s masterworks opened at the Museum of Modern Art, a short walk away in Midtown. (“When I was planning the show, I didn’t realize MoMA was gonna do this big retrospective, this massive show, but that seemed fortuitous,” Gagosian told me.) The MoMA show has been reaping praise—it’s a revelation—but the most striking thing for me is how fresh it looks, how shocking Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 remains in person, how poetically Cagean it is to see a glass bottle full of Paris air or a snow shovel hanging from the ceiling, and how maddening it is to see the Mona Lisa with a mustache.

“That’s a strange sensation, that you’re seeing these works—works that you may know of almost like, ‘the legend,’” said Ann Temkin, the Modern’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, who co-curated the show. “You may never have seen them, and yet they have such presence. They just have as much presence right now as contemporary artworks.”

Duchampian is one of those descriptors that’s both extremely specific and meaningless when misapplied to everything. See also: Lynchian, Kafkaesque, Dickensian. But there’s no denying that Duchamp’s descendants are having something of a moment. The most expensive work sold at auction by a living artist is Jeff Koons’s Rabbit, which takes the idea of a ready-made and casts it in stainless steel. You can see the lineage between Maurizio Cattelan’s “America” and Duchamp’s Fountain. They are both toilets.

Koons and Cattelan are just two of the scores of artists over the decades who have pushed Duchamp’s vision. The Pictures Generation, Richard Prince, appropriation art—all Duchamp. Cameron Rowland is an artist unafraid to make work that questions what it means to own an object, and also has Duchamp in the DNA.

And yet the original ready-mades, as seen in MoMA, haven’t lost an ounce of power.

“People are still scratching their heads,” said Michelle Kuo, the chief curator at large at MoMA, who co-curated the show. “They’re still shocked, still mystified. And that’s, I think, part of the explanation here. There’s this time travel, a message in a bottle, and people are still confused by it, which is a testament to the power of the questions he was asking.”