Art was a thing you made
For roughly five centuries before 1917, the word “art” pointed at something an artist made, by hand, with skill, in a medium: paint on canvas, marble under a chisel, bronze poured into a mold. Value flowed from craft, from beauty, from the originality of the execution and the difficulty of the subject. Even the most radical modern movements before this moment kept that floor. The Cubists shattered the way a face was drawn and the Futurists smeared motion across a canvas, but they were still painting and sculpting. They changed how the hand worked. They never questioned that the hand worked at all. A Renaissance altarpiece asked, in effect, how skillfully was this made?
The artist’s real act is choosing
Fountain proposes something that pulls the floor out. It says the artist’s essential act is not making but choosing. A manufactured object, untouched by the artist’s hand, becomes art because an artist selected it, re-titled it, and re-framed it until its ordinary use fell away. This is the whole logic of the readymade: art as idea and decision rather than skill and craft. It cuts art loose from beauty and technique and relocates it in concept and context, in the choice, the title, the signature, the pedestal, the gallery, the institutions that quietly confer the status of “art.” Where the altarpiece asked how well a thing was made, Fountain asks a colder question: who decided this is art, and why?
“The Richard Mutt Case”
The defense of that idea was published, fast and in print, in the spring of 1917. A small Dada magazine called The Blind Man (no. 2, May 1917), edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, ran the Stieglitz photograph opposite a short, unsigned editorial titled “The Richard Mutt Case.” The piece ran unsigned. It is often attributed to Duchamp, but it was the work of the magazine’s editors, and scholarship frequently credits Beatrice Woodin particular. It is not, as you will sometimes see it captioned, simply “by Duchamp.” Here it is in full:
They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit.
Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion this article disappeared and never was exhibited.
What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain:,
1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar.
2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.
Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows.
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view, created a new thought for that object.
As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.
The manifesto sits right in the middle of it: He CHOSE it.The capital letters are in the original. The whole new theory of art is in that one line. The hands did not matter; the choosing did. The text even names the mechanism, “placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view,” which is exactly what the turn, the title, and the pedestal had done. After this, an artist could make art by deciding, and a great deal of the rest of the century is the working-out of that single sentence.
Whose idea was it?
One open question runs underneath all of this. Some scholars, among them the Baroness’s biographer Irene Gammel and the art historians Glyn Thompson and Julian Spalding, argue that Fountain did not originate with Duchamp at all but with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927), a German Dada poet and artist active in New York. Their case rests on a letter Duchamp wrote his sister Suzanne on 11 April 1917 (“one of my female friends” sent in the urinal), on a reading of the handwriting, and on the Baroness’s presence in Philadelphia, where they argue this urinal model was sold. The claim has been strongly contested, notably in The Burlington Magazine in 2019 (essays by Bradley Bailey and by Dawn Adès and Alastair Brotchie), which argue the letter was mistranslated, surface a contemporary account that has Duchamp sending the urinal in himself, and note that the Baroness, famously outspoken to the end of her destitute life, never once claimed it. The debate is live, and the documentary weight currently sits with Duchamp’s authorship, which is also the reading his protest resignation supports, since the resignation only makes sense if he was the one defied.