Quick Recap & Today’s Final Jeopardy – May 26, 2016

Today’s contestants:

Dan Rothfarb, a technical writer and editor from Annandale, VA

Riley Molin, a political science student from Bloomington, IN

Buzzy Cohen, a music executive from Los Angeles, CA (8-day total: $147,803)

Scores going into Final Jeopardy:
Buzzy $16,800
Dan $7,600
Riley $2,200

Final Jeopardy! category: ART HISTORY

Final Jeopardy! clue: Escalier is the original title of a work by this artist that scandalized NYC’s International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913

[spoiler title=’Click/Tap Here for Correct Response’]Who is Marcel Duchamp? (Check the comments section for any incorrect responses.)[/spoiler]

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Here’s the work, best known now as “Nude Descending A Staircase, No. 2”.

From an NPR retrospective about the 100th anniversary of the 1913 show, also known as the “Armory Show”:

The most talked-about painting in the 1913 Armory Show deconstructed a human figure in abstract brown panels in overlapping motion. Marcel Duchamp’s Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic as “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

In 1963, on the 50th anniversary of the Armory Show, Duchamp was interviewed by CBS reporter Charles Collingwood. The audio is now at the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art.

When Collingwood asked Duchamp if he had realized that the piece would create “such a “furor,” the artist responded: “Not the slightest. In the first place, I was a very young painter, 26 years old. Never had been to America. Wasn’t here at the time.”

Duchamp said he was in France when he got word that his painting had sold for $324. After the commission, he received $240 — about $5,565, in today’s dollars. Not bad for an artist unknown in this country at the time.

On a more personal note, this painting came up during a crucial Reach For The Top match for my team many years ago. We did not have the foggiest idea about it.

I didn’t miss it this time.

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