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of works is shot through with emotion. While there is no doubt that Fountain often provoked or incited emotions—of delight from the cognoscenti, disgust from traditionalists or from the man in the street—the object itself embodies and expresses no emotion. That indeed is again part whole idea of a readymade. Because it is so disagreeable, Fountain even less successful in being emotionally neutral than other readymades, fact recognized by Duchamp himself in remarks on Comb: “During 48 years since it was chosen . . . this little iron comb has kept characteristics of a true readymade: no beauty, no ugliness, nothing aesthetic about it.” To the extent that we normally expect work of art to somehow express emotion, Fountain once more frustrates expectation.

10. Intellectual challenge. Works of art tend to be designed to utilize combined variety of human perceptual and intellectual capacities to a full indeed the best works stretch them beyond ordinary limits. By setting as a puzzle, Fountain clearly seems to fulfill this criterion. Note, however, that this object does it in a way that is different from the puzzles of large, complex works, such as The Waste Land or Finnegans Wake. Fountain’s intellectual challenges are entirely external to it: they are about its characteristics as a piece of plumbing but about its status work of art. The object stretches the imagination, to be sure, but entirely away from the object itself and into philosophy and art history.

11. Art traditions and institutions. Art objects and per performances, as much small-scale oral cultures as in literate civilizations, are created and to a given significance by their place in the history and traditions of their This single feature is the basis of the so-called institutional theory which argues that once any object has met this criterion it need meet view, one generally championed by this book, is that any artifact that or nearly all, of the other twelve features on the list does not need have this one to be a work of art; such an object could not fail to work of art in the absence of only this feature. (Some works of tribal outsider art—e.g., the traced and colored narrative illustrations of recluse artist Henry Darger—might be examples of such objects.) A case, Fountain and the other readymades are obviously objects support the importance of this criterion; indeed, institutional theory formulated in the first place largely to settle disputes about such as readymades. Used alone, this criterion would make of art a institutional construction.

12. Imaginative experience. Art objects essentially provide an imaginative experience for both producers and audiences. Art happens in a make-believe world, in the theater of the imagination. By Duchamp’s very intention, Fountain barely qualifies as an imaginative object. The plinth, the place an art gallery, promises that the object will be something for the imagination, and yet the object itself denies it. It is not at an imaginative theatrical level about plumbing, urination, or any larger human issue. It intended to leave the imagination dead and therefore to provoke meditation and lively argument about what a work of art is. This is a wholly admirable intention, but it is not in itself an artistic intention. Many theorists have over years confused the pleasures of argumentative which is in its way imaginative too, with the pleasures of art, therefore conclude that Fountain fulfills this last criterion. If they were right, then any stimulating book on aesthetic theory would be a work art.

In his defense of readymades as art, even Arthur Danto expresses queasiness about the art value of the Mott/Mutt urinal: “Fountain is every artlover’s taste, and I confess that as much as I admire it philosophically, I should, were it given me, exchange it as quickly as I could more or less than any Chardin or Morandi—or even, given the exaggerations of the art market, for a middling chateau in the valley of Loire.” But Fountain is indeed a philosophical gesture specifically not to be of any artlover’s taste, and Danto ought