MoMA is about to close its sprawling Marcel Duchamp retrospective, and painter Nolan Simon has documented 77 slides worth of a show that argues Duchamp's readymade logic still haunts everything. Across town in content-space, The Atlantic is writing about the golden age of ultra-processed health foods: low-calorie, protein-packed, engineered to signal wellness while remaining, nutritionally, a kind of fiction. Duchamp, calling it from 1917, would have appreciated the gag.
The Readymade and the Reformulated
Duchamp's original provocation with the urinal was simple: context confers meaning. Take an object, relocate it, rename it, and its value proposition completely transforms. The ultra-processed health food industry runs on the same logic. Take a product engineered in a factory, surround it with the visual language of wellness (clean labels, protein grams, athletes), and the object becomes something else. The readymade does not ask you to think about what the thing is. It asks you to accept what the context says it is. A 2021 paper in Cell Metabolism by Kevin Hall et al. found that ultra-processed diets led to significantly higher caloric intake even when matched for macronutrients, meaning the form of the food was overriding the content. Duchamp would have filed that under conceptualism.
Art Institutions and the Performance of Nourishment
The V&A workers are voting to strike over pay and working conditions, while MoMA PS1 is getting a new cafe. Museums add cafes. Processed food adds protein. The gesture of nourishment is real. The nourishment itself is negotiable. Tom Marioni, who founded the Museum of Conceptual Art and talked extensively about Duchamp, put it well: art is about the idea, not the object. The protein bar is about the idea of health, not health itself. That is either a profound continuity or a very expensive prank.