Visiting Monte Carlo in the early 1920s, Marcel Duchamp persuaded himself that he could beat the casinos at their own gambit. “I believe I have eliminated the word chance,” he informed the French businessman Jacques Doucet. “I would like to think I have forced roulette to become a game of chess.”

Duchamp was serious enough that he designed a bond to raise money for his high-stakes gamble. Investors could advance five hundred francs, to be paid back with interest, funded by future winnings. Only a few bonds sold before Duchamp lost interest in his scheme. The remaining certificates, featuring Duchamp’s signature and a photographic portrait by Man Ray, became art.

Duchamp was instrumental in this act of cultural transubstantiation. For example, he donated one of his certificates to the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. And he reproduced the Monte Carlo Bond in his own “portable museum”, a collection of miniature paintings and sculptures representative of his oeuvre, dubbed the Box in a Valise.

The contextual switcheroo was a typical Duchampian move. A spectacular retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art – the first in North America since 1973 – is loaded with art that wasn’t anything of the sort until Duchamp certified it as such.

The “readymade”, Duchamp’s signature contribution to art history, is represented at MoMA by dozens of quotidian objects he made iconic, such as a snow shovel and a bottle rack. Each emblemizes his radical contention that art is nothing more nor less than the prerogative of the artist, which can be instantiated in any object whatsoever. Some of Duchamp’s readymades were directly imported from the hardware store. Others were “assisted” by modification. The Monte Carlo Bond belongs to neither category but follows the underlying logic of both. It’s a self-made readymade. (As such, it’s worth much more than the face value of five hundred francs, let alone the paper it’s printed on.)

Although Duchamp’s first readymades date back to 1914, three years passed before his renegade inclinations went public. In 1917, he anonymously submitted a urinal to the First Annual Exhibition of Independent Artists in New York, a show he helped organize. Titled Fountain, and signed “R. Mutt”, the work was expertly designed to provoke his conservative colleagues. Breaking their own rule that all submissions would be included, they rejected it, prompting his resignation from the hanging committee and miring the Exhibition of Independent Artists in controversy.

The ostracism of Duchamp’s artwork recapitulated an earlier episode in which one of his paintings was turned down by the unjuried Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Dating from 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) created scandal incidentally by upsetting viewers’ aesthetic expectations. Fountain, in contrast, was a deliberate act of cultural sabotage. With a piece of plumbing, Duchamp set out to rupture the establishment’s aversion to innovation. Simultaneously, he sought to demonstrate that the academic values of the Louvre had infected the avant-garde.

The sabotage was desperately needed, and Duchamp’s apparatus was ingeniously engineered. The readymade was much more than a mere incendiary device. It was a sophisticated weapon of mass destruction. Carefully defused and cleverly repurposed by generations of art historians, Duchamp’s bombs are now sophisticated philosophical instruments used to probe the inner workings of aesthetics.

But did the art world really change as a result of Duchamp’s actions? Did the establishment change in the way that he intended? The mainstream view is that his strategy worked wonders. Duchamp is the foremost icon of 20^th century iconoclasm. Yet there’s scant evidence that the readymades perpetuated his radicalism. On the contrary, the move to designate anything as art has been recapitulated ad nauseum. His readymade explosives didn’t blow up the museum, but merely made it more engulfing, better able to quash provocation. In his own hands as time passed, and in the hands of countless imitators, his break with academicism became academic.

In retrospect, the problem was inevitable, inherent to his own tactics. With his readymades, Duchamp brought the quotidian world into the exhibition space. As unsettling as that might have been at the outset, the result was to withdraw art from everyday life. Ironically, Duchamp surrendered his nascent independence instead of helping others to escape the establishment. Paradoxically, his bid for radical inclusivity bolstered the privileged position of an outdated cultural construct.

Duchamp was no mere victim of his own miscalculation. As becomes clear through the superb scholarship in the MoMA catalogue, he was instrumental to the art establishment’s reestablishment of control over avant-garde forces that threatened to decenter culture in the opening decades of the 20^th century. Duchamp was a shrewd art dealer, profitably buying and selling the work of modern masters such as Constantin Brancusi and Francis Picabia. He also became adept as a curator, initially advising wealthy collectors such as Katherine Dreier and Walter and Louise Arensberg, and eventually consulting for MoMA. In all of this, he aided the culture industry, reinforcing old standards of ownership and display.

Duchamp especially applied these skills to his own art. His goal, supported by Dreier and the Arensbergs at his behest, was to consolidate his work such that as much as possible could be seen for as long as possible in a place that was as stable as possible. His values were unabashedly bourgeois, if not outright reactionary. When he finally selected the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the site of consolidation, he might as well have been choosing a mausoleum. In a 1949 letter to the Arensbergs, he praised the edifice for having a “good air of permanency”. In 1954, after the museum agreed to a semi-permanent display of his masterpieces, he effused to the Surrealist André Breton that he’d be “all right for the next twenty-five years!”)

Duchamp successfully ensured his legacy, but at what cost? His victory was really a win for his purported enemy. At most, Duchamp achieved a stalemate.

He could have walked away. In a sense, that was the idea underlying his Box in a Valise. Over many decades, Duchamp laboriously remade most all that he’d created at a scale that fit in a suitcase. It made sense for someone who never fully settled in one place, living between New York and Paris. And it furthered the subversion of the readymade by artfully refabricating the mass-produced originals and making these copies of his readymade originals available in multiple.

The trouble is that the Box in a Valise became precious in its own right. In fact, it was highly valued from the start; Duchamp priced the deluxe edition at two hundred dollars. Avidly sought by collectors, and accessioned by museums, the boxes became safe deposits for his legacy – or travel insurance in case the Philadelphia Museum ever crumbled.

Other forays into copying were even more sophisticated on a conceptual and technical level but likewise could not elude the values of originals. In the 1960s, his final decade, Duchamp collaborated with dealers on full-scale replicas of his most famous works, which he signed as “certified copies”. They neatly fit contemporary debate about authenticity, while simultaneously giving the dealers something new to sell and providing museums with plenty of fodder to stock countless exhibitions all paying homage to a rebellion the inadequacy of which was laughably self-evident.

At its worst, the MoMA retrospective perpetuates this folly, bolstering nostalgia for readymade radicalism. But the beguiling objects in the exhibition can alternatively be viewed as valuable evidence of what really happened when Duchamp attempted to beat the museum at its own game. Duchamp tried and failed to force art to become a chess match. Intentionally or not, the exhibition urges artists to chance a different gambit.