Duchamp's Fountain and the Urinal Factory

"Consider in this respect Duchamp's celebrated work ... Fountain, of 1917, which as every one knows was but a urinal of that period disconnected from the plumbing which gives it its familiar utility - familiar at least to just under half the population of the West - and turned on its back like an immobilized turtle.  It is a piece of industrial porcelain, purchased by Duchamp (himself!) from amoung its undistinguished lookalikes produced by a company called Mott Works.  It is inconsistent with the spirit of the work to imagine Duchamp anxiously examining the urinals in the salesplace until he found 'just the right one.'  Indeed, the original has been lost..."


- Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, "Appreciation and Interpretation," 32.
 

Many things have been said about Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, and (almost) all the people speaking, writing, and thinking about it have been at one point struck with confusion.  I for one am no exception; the fact that the 'original' work, the particular upside-down urinal which caused the first wave of scandal, is lost, casts a heavy fog in my mind.  I have seen in person, in at least two different times and places, editions of Fountain which Duchamp purchased, signed, and numbered, to not only replace the lost one, but also to establish a series, like a series of prints.  To be sure, George Dickie is right when he says that there are pleasant qualities about Fountain (which, not coincidentally, are also the pleasant qualities of a right-side-up regular urinal): the smooth, gleaming porcelain; "its pleasing oval shape." [33]  But I am not wrong to say that the formal qualities of Fountain, however nice they may be, are not what attracts people to see and experience the work in real life.  


I was drawn in by the legends behind this infamous ready-made, I wanted to be enveloped by the aura and mystical ether of this work of art which inevitability finds itself in the repertoire of every relevant art history class.  How disappointed was I when I found out that not only was the original piece gone, that there were eight editions all competing to inherit the legend (this I discovered after I saw my second Fountain at a different museum, and both museums labeled the work as an original, which at that time I felt was dishonest.)   In the same spirit, I also no longer enjoy seeing Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes or Campbell's Soup Cans, and only appreciate my visit insomuch as the physical work is a reminder of the rich discourse emerging from its creation.  Frankly, the Benjaminian aura has escaped the work, or perhaps it was never there, and the essence of the artwork (or at least the allure) rests on concept and philosophy.  To this I believe Mr. Danto will agree.  


One of my favourite things in philosophy are thought experiments - that is, the consideration of a theory or principle in a proposed situation, i.e. experiment, without the intention of putting it into play in actuality, for the purpose of thinking through the consequences and implications.  Fountain, like all ready-mades or art works which are formally identical to "mere objects" are rich sources for the formulation of thought experiments.  Here is one, with a bit of absurdity thrown in, for you to ponder:


Imagine that a prominent museum is directly adjacent to a Motts Works factory, which through the years has continued to produce the exact same model of urinal as those purchased in the early twentieth century by Duchamp. This prominent museum proudly houses an edition of Fountain (although, if one were to make a small change and say that the museum possesses not an edition, but the lost original, this experiment would still hold), and one day during closing hours, a new member of the janitorial staff mistakenly takes the work to be a misplaced product from Motts Works which has somehow worked itself into the building.  Being a responsible person, he cleans the messy signature (Duchamp's rough scribble of R. Mutt is easily seen as vandalism), removes the work from the museum and returns it to the factory, and Motts Works place it back in their production line.  Sometime after, the curator of modern art learns of what has happened, and in a panic, rushes to the factory to retrieve the great work.  However, nestled within hundreds of its identical siblings, and without distinguishing marks, Fountain is no longer a singular work and the curator cannot make heads or tails of which urinal is a urinal, and which is (or was) the Duchamp.  My question now is: Does it matter which urinal is retrieved?  Is the discourse on Fountain dislocated without that particular and specific urinal which Duchamp had selected? 

Danto and the Work of Art

In reading Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, two chapters in particular resonated with me, these being: “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” and “Aesthetics and the Work of Art.”  I am at once frustrated and fascinated by the enigmatic puzzles Danto has laid out in admirable organization, but to which he himself admits there are pieces missing – that is, the question to the ontological status of art is clear but confused.  While it is interesting to note that Alexander Baumgarten, heralded as the ‘inventor’ of aesthetics in philosophy, considered none other than the clear and confused representation to be the most poetical, perhaps it is not sufficient to be clear yet confused in thoughts about the representation in question, or the topic in general.  One of the best points that Danto drives home is also one that troubles me the most – the possibility that, not only do we not have a distinct or consensual answer to the old question, ‘What is Art?’ and other neighbouring questions, but also that we may have been asking the wrong questions all along. 

 “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” which is the first chapter in Danto’s Transfiguration, is terrifying because of its lucidity.  Following in the footsteps of Descartes’ famous methodology of hyperbolic doubt, Danto begins his book, and his quest for answers, by introducing historical and theoretical responses to the question of the ontology of the artwork, and in a way, eliminates (or at least, casts serious shadows) over any response that may be doubted even in the slightest.  More specifically, Danto is searching for how different ontological categories or orders of materially alike things come to be, and he presents a range of theories, from the Platonic idea of representation as a mirror to reality, to the more modern, psychological view of art as something we conceive as art or is held in the perimeters of art.  He announces the merits of each theory, yet seems to still hold doubt.  But first, let me clarify, what I mean by ‘terrifying’ – I do not mean that Danto’s ideas are ill meaning, rather, that they shake loose the foundations which I am standing upon, and I am terrified of falling.  To that, I read this chapter with great anxiety and with great care, so that I may find some sort of place of rest.   While I did not arrive at, from this chapter alone, a settled theory of my own, or a theory of another’s to defend, Danto has brought up quite a few approaches which sparks some thoughts in my mind.  In particular, one approach, which I believe he takes as the basis for his later work on the Third Realm, a topic more extensively studied in his book, The Abuse of Beauty, is to endeavor to understand the gap between art and life, i.e. imitations and reality, to understand what the two extremes have in common or not, so to better elucidate both the extremes and the middle ground at once.  Too often am I ensnared in the battle to distinguish between art and non-art, or even, high and low art, and therefore establish some sort of criterion, to even think that there is an expanse between the two.  But while I believe that the space between the extremes is increasingly closing, it must be studied as extensively as one side or the other, so that we can understand where exactly the lines are drawn.  Of course, this is at the core of my investigation: where are the lines, why do we divide them where they are, and how does this affect one’s values in the consumption of art objects and images?  I especially liked one theory that Danto purposes that the distinction between art and reality is not due to difference in material of the object or attitude of the viewer, but to conventional perimeters.  Those that are privy to the conventions of an art form understand that what they experience is not reality, and should not be reacted to as such.  Danto proposes that these conventions are indicated to us by things such as a theater stage or a painting’s frame, which appropriately annotes the objects they contain, and acts analogously as brackets or quotation marks.  So, one can conclude that we recognize objects as art by institutional, social, or situational cues, yet Danto denies this in a later chapter. 

Danto insists in chapter 4, ”Aesthetics and the Work of Art,” that what distinguishes art objects from non-art is “not institutional, it is ontological,” which heavily implies that there is a quality or qualities found in artwork that is not based on external indicators, such as attitude or material (including cues on perimeter conventions).  He admits that changes in one’s attitude towards an object, when revealed as a work of art (which may be because of reverence, ritual, or other kind of significance), is indeed a social or institutional change.  Yet the fact that we do associate some sort of quality with art which makes it worthy of our respect and change of attitude, implies that the quality is of the art itself, and may be inherent.  That is, “learning it is a work of art means that is has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks, and that our aesthetic responses will be different.”  Danto closes the chapter on that point, yet what is most revelatory to me is not the distinction between external and internal qualities, but rather his question of the place of aesthetics in the consideration of art.  He writes that while aesthetics has always had a natural place in the discussion of art, it is still in the air “whether aesthetic considerations belong to the definition of art… if they do not, then they simply will be among the things which go with the concept without pertaining to its logic,… such as preciousness or collectability,… which have also been part of the practice if not the concept of art.”  To me, this is a division which I will have to seriously consider – especially given that I have always understood qualities such as preciousness and collectability to be part of art, much less aesthetics.  In my general inspection of the role of authenticity in art for value and appreciation, I had taken for granted that there is no avoiding factors such as preciousness (for example, the material preciousness of real gold in a piece of work, as opposed to something gold-like) in evaluating the art-ness or art value of an object.  To this, I realize that perhaps my inquiry is more sociological rather than philosophical, and endeavor to pursue the possibility of the marriage of the two, as it is clear to me that there must exist an important relationship, at least in the consumption of art, between the social the ontological. 

Thoughts on Authenticity and Art

The authenticity of an art work must be considered and evaluated on several different levels – an art object can be regarded as inauthentic by certain measures yet remain authenticity in other aspects.  The different ways in which one may evaluate authenticity in a particular work of art can be broadly grouped into seven categories: socio-historical, stylistic, material, formal, production, authorship, and uniqueness. The relative importance or rejection of a particular aspect or method of authentication is subject to falling in and out of ‘fashion’ – as Victoria D. Alexander proposes with her theory of the Cultural Diamond, the elements within the world of art (artist, art, distributor, consumer, and society are all interrelated) pull each other in every which way and change throughout history.[1]  As societal values shift, so consumers and artists feel differently about what kind of authenticity is most important, and what works of art are most valuable.  The prominence of each category throughout history will be briefly discussed, with particular emphasis on the conventional attitudes of contemporary society, alongside the investigation of theorists who have endorsed particular authentication models. 

1.       Socio-historical

Socio-historical authenticity accounts for whether or not a work is produced in a certain time and place in history.  One sees this prominently in the Ancient Roman’s admiration of Ancient Greek sculptures and architecture; in collecting Grecian works, a statue made by the Ancient Greeks in Greece is valued more than its Roman copies, even though it is likely more materially degenerated or damaged through time than its newly produced, formally identical Roman counterpart. 

2.       Stylistic

The question of stylistic authenticity is whether or not a work is in the style of a certain tradition.  Style in this aspect encompasses two of Ernst Gombrich’s categories of style: style of a certain group/period/nation as well as larger classifications of time and place.[2] For example, a work of art is said to be done in the Baroque style by choosing to use properties generally accepted to be unifying characteristics of the Baroque period of art, such as chiaroscuro (strong contrast between light and dark) and atectonic[3] (open) composition.  Authentic style rarely indicates authenticity of most other categories, for instance, a painting done in the style of a particular artist is simply an imitation of general factors which are consistently found in their work, but does not indicate socio-political or even formal authenticity – a work  in the style of Vincent Van Gogh does not necessarily mean that it is an imitation of any actual existing work that he has produced (as would be the case in formal authenticity), but merely the use of methods Van Gogh is known to employ, e.g. impasto painting or using layers of contrasting colors to produce depth and shadow.   Nonetheless, stylistic authenticity can be valued over socio-political, so that a work done in the style of an Impressionist master is more valuable than an obscure work with no affiliations to canonical artistic personalities (see category 6, authorship) which was produced in the same time period. 

3.       Material

Almost every art object (with the exception of conceptual art) is made of material – in today’s   consumerist society, material authenticity is especially valued, and heavily scrutinized.  By material authenticity it is meant, Is something made of the material that it purports to be?  For example, whether or not a painting is on actual or mock canvas, or if real oil paint was used.   Differences in material quality is also noted and reflects itself in an object’s market worth, and value for one thing over its similar and usually synthetic counterpart is often due to purported material differences (for example, genuine cashmere with noticeable tactile superiority in contrast with a synthetic replacement, e.g. nylon) and/or economic value based on association with supply and demand.   It is for these two reasons – material tactility and relative rarity – that paint made of certain pure pigments is valued over the hue counterparts (i.e. a paint that approximates the color of the pure paint by method of mixing or synthetic materials), as it can be generally said to create superior visual depth and maintain longevity of color, as well as being composed of pigments found rare in nature.  It is for these same reasons that linen canvas is more “high art” nowadays and why it matters if a work’s gold leaf is gold-ish color on some other metal or genuine gold, and if actual, how many carats it is.  Material authenticity not only affects market value of a work, but also one’s appreciation of it, if the so-and-so quality of the material is important to them. 

4.       Production

When something is authentic in production, it has been produced by some determinant means.  For example, is an art object that appears to the senses as a painting actually made by a process of painting, i.e. a person with a brush or some other tool that applies wet pigments onto a surface?  Value of certain production methods generally appear to be linked to how directly and how much human labor is involved, and also accounts for what particular person or group of people was involved.  That is why a photograph developed in the traditional method of hand-processing with different chemicals is valued more than a photograph developed in by a machine, even if it is materially and formally identical. 

5.       Formal

Formal authenticity is to what degree certain expected forms are approximated.  Due to contemporary mass production and democratic distribution of images, there is necessarily some which are poor imitations of the original, which accounts for the concern for establishing the formal archetype of each work.  Formal authenticity of a reproduction is measured against the original work of art, so the quality of a poster of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is determined by how similar it is to the original painting, and of two posters which are otherwise identical (e.g. in dimensions, material, production, etc.) one can be said to be reproduced as “too blue” in comparison with the original painting, and thus deemed inferior to the other.  Formal authenticity in part includes material authenticity, for example, the impasto texture of a painting is part of its formal properties, and that is why a copy of a painting done in paint capturing the raised textures is more valuable than a flat photographic reproduction.   The formal aspect is the one category that is most consistently maintained in reproduction and copies of an original art work.

6.        Authorship

The value of authentic authorship has shifted in significant ways throughout history in terms of what ‘authorship’ entails and is important.  In the Medieval guild system, individual artists were anonymous, and authorship was distinguished by guilds[4] – as such, prestige was awarded to guild houses rather than the individual master.  In authenticating authorship, no importance was placed on the unique style of a particular master, instead, it was most important to determine if a work of art was produced by the group of people in a certain guild; even as the structure of the guild was shifted by the addition or subtraction of individual artists, the guild as a whole represented the same authentic entity.[5]  In authenticating the authorship of a Medieval work today, it is almost impossible to pinpoint the particular groups of artists who worked on any one piece.  The Medieval guild evolved into a master-apprentice system in the Renaissance, in part spurred by Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects which emphasized individual artists as unique geniuses, and so authorship was associated with a particular master artist.[6]  Well-known artists, who had recognizable styles in their work, took on apprentices to help in large or numerous commissions; and these student-artists worked alongside other apprentices as well as their master.  The apprentices were recognized as ‘apprentice in the house of so-and-so’ and thus their styles were molded to be imitative of their masters, causing difficulties in attributing authorship of a particular work or distinguishing between multiple artists within parts of one work – often a work by the hand of an apprentice is mistakenly thought to be produced by the master.  Since prestige was attributed to the master artists, it was important then and now to authenticate how much of a particular work was by the master’s hand.  Giovanni Morelli argued that the authentication of a work fell upon the shoulders of connoisseurs – lovers of art who rely on their knowledge of “art morphology,”[7] that is, external formal tendencies of particular artists, schools of art, etc. to distinguish “genuine works of the great masters from those of their pupils or imitators.”[8]   The French Academy established in 1648 and lasting until the nineteenth century was in many ways a synthesis of the Medieval guild system and the master-apprentice system.[9]   The Academy was an institutional body composed of distinguished artists who dictated what was or was not good in art and controlled the education, exhibition, and distribution of professional art work.[10]  Thus, young artists were highly dependent on the Academy for advancement.  The Academic system emphasized both a strict art practice grounded on a defined aesthetic system (even establishing a hierarchy of genres, of which history paintings occupied the pinnacle),[11] as well as promoting the individual ‘star students’ whose works would be favored for distribution to the public.[12]  While association with the Academy was valued in and of itself (the work of an artist trained by the Academy would be preferred over one who was not), there was at the same time the acknowledgement of artists who was accomplished as an individual, and so authenticity of authorship was based on both a tie to a particular institution, i.e. the Academy, and individual genius.  As the Academy became over-saturated from its resounding success, the demand for works grew, and the notion of the individual artist as noteworthy, with unique and particular personal styles distinguished from the Academy, became increasingly prominent.[13]  Today the model of authorship continues from this vein, and artists are singled out for their individual style. 

7.       Uniqueness

The uniqueness and originality of a work means that it is the one and only work of its kind – that is, it is authentic in all the previous aspects.  This is how one work can be differentiated as the original piece, and through history, authentic uniqueness of a work has been proven as the most valued.  Of course, there are numerous grey areas to the uniqueness of a work; a piece can fulfill the criterion of all seven authentication aspects yet still not be considered the most valuable. One example is the ‘copy’ of a piece by the artist themselves; due to popularity an artist may create more than one version of a work which are often very similar.  Photographs are perhaps the most prone to this ambiguity, where the original is indistinguishable from the rest in all aspects.  In the tradition of print-making, the first work produced in a series of identical works is considered the original, yet unlike individual prints which necessarily deviate from the rest due to degradation of the template (carving, plate, etc.) or variation in method, it is still to be questioned how identical photographs, digital reproductions, and so on, can be distinguished from one another in terms of originality.

There is no doubt that there are other things that factor into the authenticity of an object, or that there are more specific sub-categories within each classification.  However, in evaluating a work of art, these seven broad categories are the most prominently regarded.  It is important to note that while this paper has presented seemingly unambiguous categorizations so that each aspect is a binary (i.e. it is either authentic or it is not), the evaluation of authenticity is in fact characterized by being a spectrum.  Each aspect should be approached as a gradient, so it can be said, for example, that a work of art is mostly formally authentic, e.g. shapes are identical but the color is not.  The sophisticated mimesis of an authentic work may trick or confuse even the most critical spectator, and it is probably true that one can never know with absolute certainty and clarity if a particular work is truly authentic.  But it is dangerous to regress towards extreme skepticism and reject the possibility of any existence of authenticity; one must put one’s foot down.  So long as a work of art is evaluated to be authentic on all seven counts, and therefore is a genuinely unique piece, and one believes that it is authentic by these measures, then the effect of the aesthetic experience will not be impeded (this will be discussed further in Section III of this paper).

 Of these seven groups, it can be generally supposed that there is a rough hierarchy of importance: a category of higher number has priority over a lower one in terms of how appreciative people are of it.  For example, authentic authorship (6^th) is generally a more important quality than material authenticity (3^rd) in evaluating a work of art.  It must be emphasized that this hierarchy does not imply a relationship of inclusion or exclusion, that is, an authentic higher rank aspect does not presuppose that all those lower categories are fulfilled as well, nor does the failure to meet a lower aspect mean that it is impossible to be authentic at a higher number; e.g. a work does not have to be stylistically authentic to be authentic in method of production. No categories are mutually exclusive; in fact, certain aspects are more often than not coupled with others.  Some categories necessarily include other aspects; for example, a work that is formally authentic must logically be stylistically authentic as well.  In particular, uniqueness of a work demands that all aspects of authenticity are applied, and this is the only category that necessarily includes all the above.

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[1] Victoria D. Alexander. "A Mediated View: The Cultural Diamond." In Academy to Public Sale, Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms, 60-63. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003).

[2] Ernst Gombrich. "Style." In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 129-140. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[3] Heinrich Wölfflin. "Principles of Art History." In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 120. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[4] V.H. Minor. "The Academy." In Art History's History, 7-18. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001).; Robert Williams. "Antiquity and the Middle Ages." In Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, 7-39. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Giovanni Morelli. "Italian Painters." In Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology, edited by Eric Fernie, 101. (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).

[8] Ibid, 104.

[9] Alexander. “The Cultural Diamond - Case Study 5.1: From Academy to Public Sale.” 83-88.

[10] Minor. "The Academy.” 7-18.

[11] Joshua Reynolds. "Discourses on Art." In Art and its Histories: A Reader, 37-43. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and The Open University, 1999).

[12] Minor. “The Academy.” 7-18.

[13] Alexander. “The Cultural Diamond - Case Study 5.1: From Academy to Public Sale.” 83-88 ; Minor. “The Academy.” 7-18.