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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\u2014to honor his spiritual 980 neighbor, he\u2019s doing a Duchamp show. The timing could not be better, as earlier this month a mind-bending survey of Duchamp\u2019s masterworks opened at the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, a short walk away in Midtown. (\u201cWhen I was planning the show, I didn\u2019t realize MoMA was gonna do this big retrospective, this massive show, but that seemed fortuitous,\u201d Gagosian told me.) The MoMA show has been reaping praise\u2014it\u2019s a revelation\u2014but the most striking thing for me is how fresh it looks, how shocking Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a strange sensation, that you\u2019re seeing these works\u2014works that you may know of almost like, \u2018the legend,\u2019\u201d said Ann Temkin, the Modern\u2019s chief curator of painting and sculpture, who co-curated the show. \u201cYou may never have seen them, and yet they have such presence.<\/em> They just have as much presence right now as contemporary artworks.\u201d<\/p>\n Duchampian<\/em> is one of those descriptors that\u2019s both extremely specific and meaningless when misapplied to everything. See also: Lynchian<\/a>, Kafkaesque, Dickensian. But there\u2019s no denying that Duchamp\u2019s descendants are having something of a moment. The most expensive work sold at auction by a living artist is Jeff Koons\u2019s Rabbit,<\/em> which takes the idea of a ready-made and casts it in stainless steel. You can see the lineage between Maurizio Cattelan<\/a>\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u201d<\/em> and Duchamp\u2019s Fountain<\/em>. They are both toilets.<\/p>\n Koons and Cattelan are just two of the scores of artists over the decades who have pushed Duchamp\u2019s vision. The Pictures Generation, Richard Prince<\/a>, appropriation art\u2014all 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.<\/p>\n And yet the original ready-mades, as seen in MoMA, haven\u2019t lost an ounce of power.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are still scratching their heads,\u201d said Michelle Kuo, the chief curator at large at MoMA, who co-curated the show. \u201cThey\u2019re still shocked, still mystified. And that\u2019s, I think, part of the explanation here. There\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n