New York must have struck Duchamp as a spectacle from the future. From Otis elevators and skyscrapers to ultra-modern bathrooms and steel combs, "all the great modern things", as Andy Warhol was to call them, were already in place in America in 1915 while Europe was still struggling free of its ancien régimes. It must be this translation to the future that gave Duchamp his unparalleled intellectual freedom, an alienated liberation familiar to travellers. He sought the estrangement to which his readymades are eerie monuments.