• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Gordon’s Gin initiated the survey of experts “in order to identify key pieces to help the public understand more about the inspiration and pieces to help the public understand more about the inspiration creative process.” To that end, the corporation hired a former Tate curator, Simon Wilson, to clarify it all. As he explained, “The Duchampian notion that art can be made of anything has finally taken off. And only about formal qualities, but about the ‘edginess’ of using a urinal thus challenging bourgeois art.” Of those polled, it was artists in par who plumped for Fountain, he pointed out: “it feels like there generation out there saying, ‘Cut the crap’—Duchamp opened modern art.”

If a better understanding of the creative process was the purpose Gordon’s Gin exercise, it seems to have failed. CNN couldn’t get the story straight, wrongly reporting that the art experts voted Fountain “the world’s best piece of art,” while visitors to the BBC Web site predictably railed against the art experts’ choice. “Insulting!” “Pretentious idiots!” they wrote. “If true artists like Leonardo da Vinci saw this they would turn in their graves.” “These people go their own elitist disdaining way, society goes another,” wrote one reader. “Finally,” said another, “a piece modern art to receive my opinion of it.”

Going by that comment, as well as Simon Wilson’s, you’d think Duchamp had only just come up with Fountain, rather than having it to the art world eighty-seven years earlier. Fountain was not first instance of a type of art Duchamp called “readymades,” ordinary objects manufactured for industrial or consumer use but presented world as works of art. Having already established himself as an modernist artist with his remarkable painting Nude Descending Staircase, Duchamp moved on to a new and radically different idea: It might be possible for art to be a form of expression purely for mind, rather than the eye. His first experiment in this direction, toward pure ideas and away from “retinalart,” as he termed it, was Bicycle Wheel. Like Fountain, this 1913 work is lost, although many years later Duchamp reconstructed it for the Museum of Modern Art.) It is a bicycle wheel that turns in a fork mounted on a wooden stool. Because it was assembled piece of kinetic sculpture. Then came two celebrated quintessential readymades: Bottle Rack (1914), a galvanized rack for drying bottles, also thrown out by his sister, and In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), which a snow shovel purchased at a hardware store and signed. (The original versions of these also disappeared.) Next, Duchamp came up with Comb, a flat, heavy dog-grooming comb with a suitably Dadaist inscription, “Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savagery.”

At last he produced his most notorious achievement, something strikingly ugly in the eyes of many people: a porcelain urinal that Duchamp purchased at the J. L. Mott Iron Works in Brooklyn. He the work on the side “R. Mutt 1917” and entered it in a show Society of In dependent Artists, of which he was a founder. It was rejected for exhibition, and Duchamp resigned from the society. Although the original piece is lost, it was recorded in a famous photograph Alfred Stieglitz, and in the 1950s Duchamp “re-created” it by purchasing urinals and then inscribing them with the same 1917 name, like a series of signed prints. Duchamp later wrote that Fountain sprang from the idea of making an experiment concerned with taste: choose the object which has the least chance of being liked. A urinal— few people think there is anything wonderful about a urinal. The danger to be avoided lies in aesthetic delectation.”

As Nude Descending a Staircase and his later mixed-media work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even both demonstrate, Duchamp an artist of unusual talent in a purely traditional sense. But his creatively jumpy mind was also that of a mathematician, high-level chess player, theorist, and jokester. He could not be satisfied with painting and looking for ways to go beyond it, to negate the “cleverness