Sunday 26 June 2011

Thrashed at chess by the ghost of Marcel Duchamp

As you can see I've just been thrashed in a game of online chess. I'm rubbish at chess so it was not a big surprise that it took my opponent just a couple of minutes to rub my nose in it. However, I didn't feel too bad about it since it's not everyday you get to play with the ghost of a famous artist. Marcel Duchamp is one the founders of conceptual art and perhaps one of the twentieth century's mots creative minds. He gave up making art to become a chess master. He obviously saw many parallels between the kind of conceptual strategies he used to create challenging new art works (some of which redefined how we think about art) and the game of chess.

The creator of this website has apparently designed the computer opponent to play in the style of Marcel Duchamp. I think this is an idea that Duchamp himself would have found highly amusing.

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