Marcel Duchamp and Sturtevant. Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs The most beautiful art exhibitions to see in Milan during Art Week and Fuorisalone
By Giada Storelli
Two artists, an impossible yet surprisingly timely dialogue: at Thaddaeus Ropac Milano, "Dialogues are Mostly Fried Snowballs" takes center stage, a heated exchange between Marcel Duchamp and Sturtevant. On one side, the father of conceptual art, whose readymades forever undermined the idea of a work of art; on the other, an artist who made repetition a radical gesture, dismantling from within the very system inaugurated by Duchamp. The result is not a simple historical exhibition, but a continuous short circuit between original and copy, gesture and thought. Iconic objects such as the Fountain or the Porte-bouteilles return to the stage alongside their "replicas" by Sturtevant, in a subtle game that challenges every certainty: what is a work of art, really? Where does the author end and his double begin?
The exhibition moves between eroticism, movement, irony, and critical thinking, building a confrontation that is also a challenge. It's no coincidence that the title echoes a cutting quip by Sturtevant: dialogues are "fried snowballs," something seemingly impossible, yet real. At its core, the tension remains that already intuited by Walter Benjamin: what is happening to art in the age of reproducibility? Here, the answer is not theoretical, but visual and direct. The works are observed, duplicated, sabotaged. More than a tribute, the exhibition is a fertile battleground between two visions that continue to question the present, now more than ever, in the age of infinite images and artificial intelligence.
