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Articles

Did Duchamp’s Urinal Flush Away Art?

Roy Turner scorns the fact that after Duchamp, critics have questioned the status of ‘traditional’ Western art, making the act of designation the sole determinant of art.

In hearing the music of the young Mozart, an obscure eighteenth century composer is reported to have said, “This young man will cause us all to be forgotten.” In 1977, evaluating the influence of such works by Marcel Duchamp as a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool and a urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’ and captioned ‘Fountain’, author and art critic Calvin Tomkins declared that Duchamp had “quietly undermined several centuries of Western art with his readymades.” Mozart’s contemporary was mostly right. Was Tomkins just plain wrong?

The Louvre and the Uffizi are alive and well: it was not traditional painting that took it on the chin after Duchamp, but the philosophy of art.

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