Duchamp and Sturtevant: Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs Must-see exhibitions in Milan during Art Week 2026

By Vittoria Caprotti

Titled after a wry observation by Sturtevant, Dialogues Are Mostly Fried Snowballs reflects Duchamp's penchant for puns, highlighting the foresight of both artists' artistic practices in the age of digital reproduction and AI. It is an unprecedented artistic and intellectual exchange between two true pioneers : Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art; and Sturtevant, whose practice critically interrogated the conceptual structure of art in a post-Duchampian world. Just as Duchamp rejected "retinal art," Sturtevant's radical repetitions, made from memory based on works by his contemporaries, triggered a further leap from image to concept. Over the course of four decades, Sturtevant repeatedly employed Duchamp's very "style" as a means to investigate the underlying structure of his work: how it was made, experienced, and, above all, canonized.