Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Rrose Selavy: photography, ready-made, brand

In the early 20^th century, art was confronted with entrepreneurship and the logic of cultural marketing. With the end of the World War I the consumer society began to form: the work of art started to function as a specific simulation commodity. In relation to the sacralization of the art and the aesthetic value that until that time seemed to be beyond the laws of consumption and mass-media American artist and photographer Man Ray took a less radical position than his friend, the French dadaist Marcel Duchamp. The concept invented by them under the intriguing name Rrose Selavy officially became Duchamp's artistic alter ego, also had a less refined function, becoming a brand of American Dadaism. This artwork has gone through all the stages of commodity attribution of the image: as a symbolic picture, then through image products, even fictional, and then got into the field of marketing and advertising, appearing on the cover of the magazine - the only issue of the Manifesto New York Dada. For both artists this experience was absolutely individual. Duchamp used the photographs created by Ray not just for reproduction of the new image, but mainly for the implementation of another anti-art work, which he did repeatedly in a variety of ways. An uncomplicated picture got the significance of a symbol. The photography of the fictional Rrose Selavy becomes the face of a new direction, through the mediation of the image on the label of a bottle with mystical toilet water called Belle Haleine. The idea, released from artistic qualities, demonstrates a new fetishization of a woman as a successful image for any product, including a conceptual one. Duchamp and Man Ray the creators of this art-product, mixed highly-intellectual criteria with the consumer, while maintaining a semblance of the traditional hierarchy of "high" and "low", turned it upside down. For Man Ray, the endless exchange of these values later will be an important part of his entire creative strategy, both in the field of order and in purely artistic experiments. Ray found a special communicative formula of visuality at the time of the emergence of new modal zones with their blurred boundaries between art and non-art that will subsequently allow the photographer to carry out a successful commercial enterprise under his own art brand Man Ray.

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