I am in Paris at the moment and they are advertising a Duchamp exhibition at one of the art museums. Predictably they are using a large photo of Fountain on their publicity posters in the metro etc. So every now and then you pass this large photo of an upturned urinal signed R Mutt 1917.
More than ever I am struck by how feeble the thing is. At most, it seems to me, Fountain was really only interesting as a kind of political statement about the futility of art etc. Today the force of that has almost completely dissipated (the idea seems very ho hum) so the work is forced to stand on its own two feet simply as a work of art. In those terms it is decidedly uninteresting, and seeing it everywhere in large photo reproductions really brings that home to you. If one sat it beside a reproduction of, say, a Picasso or a Miro, its weakness would seem even more obvious. All the above applies to Warhol things like Brillo boxes too, in my view. DA
