LHOOQ

Duchamp took a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa, penciled a mustache and goatee onto her famous face, and added a string of letters that, read aloud in French, make a crude joke. With this small act of vandalism he mocked the cult of the masterpiece and the whole notion of artistic reverence. Now in Philadelphia, L.H.O.O.Q. is a key work of Dada - irreverent, witty, and corrosive, defacing the most sacred painting in the world (also in this collection) to ask whether art's authority was anything more than a fragile convention.