Quote: The object of the Round Table was to bring a representation of the best informed opinion of the time to bear on questions about art today (1949). A set of neat conclusions, as to the outcome of the conference, was neither expected nor desired. Rather, it was hoped that progress would be made in the exposure of hidden assumptions, in the uprooting of obsolete ideas, and in the framing of new questions.
You notice both Frank Lloyd Wright and Marcel Duchamp both seated there? Check out UBUweb’s full abstract of the proceedings including transcripts, recordings and images, here.
Whoa. Check this out:
Wright: “Would you say homosexuality was degenerate?”
Duchamp: “No, it is not degenerate.”
Wright: “Would you say that this movement which we call modern art and painting has been greatly, or is greatly, in debt to homosexualism?”
Duchamp: “I admit it, but not in your terms . . . I believe that the homosexual public has shown more interest or curiosity for modern art than the heterosexual: so it happened, but it does not involve modern art itself.”
Wright: “But no man in his confusion, in his inability to conduct his life and himself on a plane more or less of manhood as we understand it––maybe it’s a mistake––feels the need of this refreshment, and goes to the darkie, goes to the primitive, wherever he can find it, and feeling strengthened by it begins to copy it, begin to imitate it . . . this thing that belongs like a property of childhood to the early days of the race . . .
From Degeneracy and Primitivism