The Most Important Artist of the Century [Good Life series]

A survey asked our generation’s leading artists and critics to identify the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Who won? If you guessed Pablo Picasso — nice try, but he came in second.

Before identifying the survey’s winner, let’s ask why it matters who topped the list.

Any generation’s top artists and critics have much cultural power. They decide what kind of art we will experience for the rest of our lives. They make the art and display it to us. They tell us what it means and what we should try to experience. Some sit on committees that make grants and awards to encourage the kind of art that they think is most worthy. Their judgments allocate prestigious gallery and museum space and influence who commands the big money at art auctions. Many are also professors of art who shape the thinking of students who will go on to become the critics, designers, and artists who will shape our aesthetic for decades to come.

So their pronouncements about which artists we should most learn from are of great cultural significance.

And the survey’s winner is … Marcel Duchamp, especially for his Fountain. At first glance, Fountain might look like an ordinary men’s urinal with the letters R. MUTT and the numerals 1917 written upon it. But of course we must probe more deeply, for Duchamp was also a highly-proficient chess player, and his displaying the urinal was a sophisticated move in the intellectual game he was playing with the high-art establishment.

The early twentieth century marks a major break in art history. For centuries, cultured people learned to understand visual art in terms of three interrelated elements: the artist makes an object that is experienced by the viewer.

Duchamp was a clever student of art history, so if we want to know what he means by the urinal, we should ask:

* What is he saying we should think of the artist?
* What is he saying we should think of the art object?
* What does he want us to experience in the presence of art?

We like to think of artists as special human beings with great skills at molding sensuous objects that express their powerful emotions and depths of thought. But our artist-candidate in this case, Marcel Duchamp, went to the plumbing supplier’s, bought something off the shelf, put it in a crate, and shipped it off. No special skill, passion, or thinking is needed for that.

We like to think of art objects as special — as unique, irreplaceable objects that deserve reverent care in our homes, workspaces, and museums. But the art object in this case, a urinal, is a chunk of industrial porcelain that was mass-produced in some factory or other, just like thousands of other identical items in toilets the world over.

We like to think of aesthetic experience as something elevates us and enriches our senses, emotions, and intellects, even when it focuses our attention upon the dark and the tragic. But when we confront the urinal, we experience puzzlement and ickiness. In a space devoted to art, we are to dwell upon urine, urination, and the disposal of human waste.

Altogether then, Duchamp’s Fountain is a network of statements about art: the artist is nothing special, the art object is nothing special, and unless you like being grossed out, art is not worth your time. In other words, Piss on art.

Such a statement about art truly is profound, and given the post-Duchamp trajectory of modern art Marcel Duchamp’s place at the top of the survey is well deserved.

But it’s important to note here that Duchamp explicitly did not consider his urinal to be a work of art. Mocking those critics who twisted themselves into intellectual pretzels trying to explain why we should admire Fountain — Bold contours! Smooth purity of line! — Duchamp said, “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

So if you happen to read a critic praising Fountain’s artistic merits, feel welcome to laugh along with Duchamp at the critic’s pretentious missing of the point. Duchamp’s claim is that the urinal is not art — and that the art world’s deep thinkers’ inability to say why it isn’t is the clearest symptom of their intellectual bankruptcy.

And that is still the challenge of Fountain. Making a statement about art is not the same thing as making art. So we can agree with Duchamp that his symbolic gesture is meant as a gauntlet thrown down to those interested in discovering where the boundary is between art and non-art.

But aside from the issue of defining art, there’s still a question about the content of Fountain: Why did Duchamp want to make that statement about art? If his point were only about readymades, then at the plumbing-supplier’s he could have acquired a kitchen sink or a shower faucet and sent that in as his exhibit. The nihilism about art implicit in the urinal’s Piss on you symbolism is shocking. And the fact that the world of high art has embraced Duchamp as its leading representative of one hundred years of art speaks directly to the starkly negative turn that modern art took a century ago. (See my article “Why Art Became Ugly” for the elements of philosophical, religious, political, and scientific pessimism that coalesced by the turn of the twentieth century as Duchamp, Picasso, and the other leading-artists-to-be were coming of age.)

Duchamp’s original urinal is lost, but seventeen carefully-crafted replicas were made in 1964. One of the replicas is now at the Tate Museum in London. Friends of the Tate paid an undisclosed sum for it in 1999. That Fountain is located in an impressive building on some expensive London real estate (next door to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), and it is protected by the best security that money can buy. That enables thousands of people every year to file past Fountain and take the requisite picture.

But occasionally Fountain gets the attention it deserves. During regular museum hours, performance artists sometimes show up and make their own fountains, so to speak, by unzipping and emptying their bladders upon Duchamp’s Fountain. The Tate’s staff members are never pleased. But no doubt Marcel would be proud of his spiritual children.

[This article was originally published in English at EveryJoe.com and in Portuguese at Libertarianismo.org.]