The Urinal Question

In 1917 the Society of Independent Artists in New York announced an exhibition with no jury: any member who paid six dollars could show anything.

Marcel Duchamp was on the board. He bought a porcelain urinal from a plumbing supplier, turned it on its back, signed it 'R. Mutt 1917', titled it Fountain, and submitted it under that name.

The board debated it, and hid it behind a partition. Duchamp resigned.

The object then disappeared. It survives as one photograph by Alfred Stieglitz and as a paragraph in the little magazine The Blind Man, which put the argument in terms nobody has improved on: whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view, and created a new thought for that object.

That is the readymade: the artistic act is selection and placement, not fabrication.

You can dismiss this as a prank, and it was partly a prank, and it still poses the question the century has been unable to put down. If a thing's status as art does not come from how it looks or from the skill of its making, where does it come from?

The honest answers all point outward, to context.

Arthur Danto's version came out of standing in front of Warhol's Brillo Boxes in 1964 and asking why those were art while the identical cartons in the stockroom were not. His answer: to see something as art requires an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art (an artworld). The difference is not in the object, because there is no difference in the object.

George Dickie's institutional theory made it flatter: something is art when a person acting on behalf of the artworld confers on it the status of candidate for appreciation. The definition is openly circular, and its defenders argue that the circularity is descriptive rather than defective. It tells you how the practice actually works.

Both accounts are uncomfortable, and they should be. They imply that the question 'is it art?' is settled by a social process rather than by anything in the thing, and that the process can be captured, or gamed, or simply wrong.

But notice the mistake almost every public argument about this makes. 'Is it art?' and 'is it any good?' are different questions, and the readymade argument only answers the first.

Showing that something counts as art tells you nothing about whether it is worth your time. Showing that something is bad does not demonstrate that it is not art. Conflating the two produces both of the standard positions (the defender who treats institutional acceptance as proof of value, and the sceptic who treats worthlessness as proof of fraud) and neither follows.

There is one more twist, and it is either an embarrassment or the perfect ending.

The Fountain in the Tate, and in Philadelphia, and in Paris, is not the 1917 object. That was lost within a year. What exists is a set of roughly sixteen replicas authorised by Duchamp in the 1960s, fabricated by a dealer from the Stieglitz photograph, signed 'R. Mutt' by Duchamp in his own hand, and now insured for millions.

A work made to argue that the artist's hand is irrelevant is represented by authorised copies that the artist did not make and that are valuable because he signed them.

Duchamp, who spent much of his life playing chess and declining to explain himself, is unlikely to have found that a problem.