A show with no jury
In 1916 a group of New York artists and collectors founded the Society of Independent Artists, modeled on a Paris society of the same name. Its rule was simple: no jury and no prizes. Any artist who paid six dollars could exhibit, and the society’s first show opened on 10 April 1917 at the Grand Central Palace, a huge exhibition hall on Lexington Avenue, with more than two thousand works hung in alphabetical order.
One entry was a white porcelain urinal, turned on its back and signed “R. Mutt 1917.” By Marcel Duchamp’s later account, he had bought it with the painter Joseph Stella and the collector Walter Arensberg at the J. L. Mott Iron Works, a plumbing supplier on Fifth Avenue (no purchase date is documented, and one recent writer disputes the shopping trip). Duchamp sat on the society’s board, and most of his fellow directors did not know he had sent it. After debate, a majority voted against showing it, and it was kept out of the show. In a letter on 11 April to his sister Suzanne, Duchamp wrote that “one of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt,” had sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. Duchamp resigned from the board, and so did Arensberg.
The photographer Alfred Stieglitz photographed the urinal at his gallery, 291, in front of a painting by Marsden Hartley. The picture appeared in the second issue of a small magazine, The Blind Man, in May 1917, edited by Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, with the caption “The exhibit refused by the Independents.” An unsigned editorial, “The Richard Mutt Case,” replied to the objections: that the object was immoral (“no more than a bath tub is immoral”) and that it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance,” it said. “He CHOSE it.” He took an ordinary article of life and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view, and created a new thought for that object.
The original was soon lost. Every Fountain in a museum today is a replica Duchamp authorized: the first in 1950, then more in 1953 and 1963, and an edition of eight in 1964 for a gallery in Milan. Replicas are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, among others. One from the 1964 edition sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1999 for about $1.8 million, and in December 2004 five hundred British art-world professionals voted it the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The order of events matters for this lesson. First the object was refused by the people in charge. Then it was photographed and argued over. Decades later it was copied and collected.
Who actually made or chose it is not settled. Irene Gammel’s 2002 biography of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven made her a central figure in New York Dada, and recent writers, among them Glyn Thompson in 2023 on handwriting evidence, have argued that she made or supplied the urinal. Popular books sometimes state that as fact; scholars do not. No document shows anyone but Duchamp choosing or submitting it, and his own later statements treat it as his.
Games, families, and a thread
The lecture starts from a doubt about whether art can be defined at all, and borrows from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Philosophical Investigations (1953, published after his death), sections 65 to 71, he asks what all games have in common, and answers that you should not assume there is something: “don’t think, but look!” The result, he says, is “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.” He calls them “family resemblances,” and notes that members of a family share “build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament,” without any one feature running through all of them. Chess and tic-tac-toe share a board, poker and solitaire share cards, and so on, with no one feature running through the whole set.
The lecture adds two pictures: a family that shares a surname, and a rope woven from short strands of straw. Neither is quite in the book. In Wittgenstein’s text the family resembles in looks, not in a shared name, and the image of the thread comes in the same section, but is about the concept of number: we extend it as when spinning a thread we twist “fibre on fibre,” and its strength lies “in the overlapping of many fibres,” not in one fibre running its whole length. And Wittgenstein says nothing about art in those sections. The application came in 1956, from the American philosopher Morris Weitz, in an essay called “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”: art is an open concept, he argued, and a new kind of work can always stretch it, so it cannot be defined. Try the idea on six games.
Is there one thing all games share?
Pick a feature and see which of six games have it. Then try to find one that all six share.
The lecture puts Plato on the other side, as the thinker who held that all tables share one essence. That is a fair summary of the Republic, where Socrates speaks of just one Form for each kind of thing, one for a bed and one for a table. It is the lecture’s pairing, though, not Wittgenstein’s. And family resemblance has a known weakness. The philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum argued in 1965 that resemblance on the surface is not enough: whatever unites artworks must be a relation that does not show on the surface, such as where an object came from or how it was put forward, and the urinal makes the point, since it resembles every other urinal.
A candidate for appreciation
The American philosopher George Dickie took that hint in “Defining Art” (1969). A work of art, he proposed, is an artifact on which “some society or some sub-group of a society” has conferred “the status of candidate for appreciation.” In his 1974 book he replaced the group with an institution: the status is conferred by “some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution,” which he called the artworld. The term came from the philosopher Arthur Danto’s essay of 1964, which the next section takes up. In his 1984 book The Art Circle, Dickie put it as a circle: art is an artifact made to be presented to an artworld public.
The word that carries the weight is “candidate.” It does not mean good, or prized, or even appreciated. It means eligible to be taken up and judged. A candidate is not a winner. The lecture uses the idea to explain a feature of the art market: why does one object sell for a fortune and a near-twin for nothing? Ask the people who bid, it says, and the galleries, critics, and auction houses behind them. In its words, this is “hype,” though a measure of hype, it adds, is part of how any artworld works. A historian’s example fits. The Mona Lisa was already admired by educated people before 1911: Théophile Gautier called her a sphinx of beauty in 1859, and Walter Pater’s essay in 1869 made her mystical. On 21 August 1911, an Italian who had worked at the Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia, stole it. It was found in Florence in December 1913, when he tried to sell it, and was back in the Louvre in January 1914. The historian Donald Sassoon argues in Becoming Mona Lisa (2001) that the theft and the press storm around it turned an admired painting into the most famous one in the world. Other causes mattered too, among them reproductions and parody.
What does “candidate for appreciation” mean in Dickie’s definition?
What the eye cannot see
In April 1964, at the Stable Gallery in New York, Andy Warhol showed stacks of plywood boxes, painted and silkscreened to look like cartons of Brillo soap pads. The design of the real Brillo box was by a commercial artist, James Harvey. In October that year the philosopher Arthur Danto published “The Artworld” in the Journal of Philosophy. His question: if the eye cannot tell Warhol’s box from the one in the supermarket, what makes one of them art? His answer, a famous sentence: to see something as art “requires something the eye cannot descry,” “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” He developed the argument later in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), where such indistinguishable pairs are central.
The lecture contrasts Danto with Dickie. For Dickie, status is conferred by persons acting for an institution. For Danto, it comes from reasons, within the history of art. Said gently, for Danto art history is the court, not a board. The lecture also reports a grid. In the 1964 essay Danto lets one property stand for “is representational” and another for “is expressionist,” and a style is a cell in the grid: representational and expressionist, one but not the other, or neither. The lecture fills the four cells with Matisse and the Fauves, Ingres, Pollock, and a hard-edge abstract painter. The properties and the logic are Danto’s. Which painters he himself placed in which cell this course could not confirm, so those names are the lecture’s illustration.
The logic has a surprising consequence. A new cell changes the old ones. Before there was an expressionist style, no earlier painting could be called non-expressionist; once there is, they all can. The lecture states this in a startling line: Duchamp changes Raphael. The line has a respectable relative. In 1919 the poet T. S. Eliot argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them,” and that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” This course found no passage in which Danto cites Eliot for this. The line from Eliot to Duchamp to Danto is ours.
What was Danto’s point about Warhol’s Brillo Box and the supermarket carton?
What authorization cannot do
The lecture is frank about the limits. Authorization tells us what counts as art, but it does not tell us what is good. A work can be authorized and dull. And it struggles with art that leaves nothing to collect. In 1980 the performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay stood leaning back from each other, holding a drawn bow and arrow, the arrow pointed at her heart, while two small microphones near their hearts picked up the beating. It lasted four minutes and ten seconds. The lecture calls it a work that cannot be authorized or collected, since it was over when it ended. It adds details this course could not support. No source says the arrow was poisoned. And the two had worked together for four years by then, not ten: the partnership ran from 1976 to 1988.
Museums have found ways round the problem. A video of Rest Energy is held by the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. In November 2005, at the Guggenheim in New York, Abramović performed seven works over seven consecutive nights: five by other artists, among them Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Joseph Beuys, and two of her own, re-performing them with the consent of the artists or their estates. In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective, The Artist Is Present, with trained younger performers re-enacting her early works. And the artist Tino Sehgal sells live works with no certificate, receipt, or photograph, by a spoken agreement before a notary and witnesses; the Guggenheim acquired his This Progress in 2010. The critic Peggy Phelan argued in 1993 that performance “cannot be saved, recorded, documented,” which is the lecture’s side of the argument. The practice of museums is the other side.
Meanwhile the lecture’s own turn is a good one. The three pieces of its analysis so far, imitation, freedom, and form, ask what a thing is. Authorization asks when it is art. Next, a way of asking what a work does at the time.
Possession plus reference
The American philosopher Nelson Goodman asked that question in Languages of Art (1968), a book about how works mean. His idea of exemplification begins with a tailor’s swatch. A swatch of cloth shows a customer a color and a weave: it has those properties, and it refers to them. It does not exemplify its size or its ragged edge, because it is not there to show those. In a phrase, exemplification is possession plus reference. A sample is not just any object; it is an object doing a job. The job it does is not fixed: a stack of fabric on a shelf is only cloth.
What does a swatch exemplify?
A tailor holds up a small square of green wool twill. For each property, decide whether the swatch exemplifies it: does it have it, and is it there to show it?
Goodman added that a picture can work this way too, in a figurative sense. A painting can be sad, or heavy, without being a person or a stone: it has sadness metaphorically, and points to it. That is what he calls expression, metaphorical exemplification. The lecture gives a classroom picture of the idea with Van Gogh’s boots. The word “shoe” refers to shoes but has none of a shoe’s weight or leather. A real shoe has its own qualities but points to nothing beyond them. A painted shoe, with its heavy paint, dark colors, and dragging line, has those qualities and points to them. That is a good teaching picture, but the wording is the lecture’s. In Goodman’s account the weight and gloom are what the painting figuratively has and shows, while “the owner’s hardship” is a reading that goes back to Heidegger’s essay on the boots, the subject of the next lesson’s story.
Goodman’s own turn comes in an essay of 1977, “When Is Art?”, later a chapter in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). He proposed that we stop asking only “What is art?” A Rembrandt used as a blanket, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes him, “remains a work of art, as it remains a painting,” though it is “functioning only as a blanket.” What changes is whether it functions as art at that time. Something can be art at one time and not at another. He also listed symptoms of the aesthetic: syntactic density, semantic density, relative repleteness, exemplification, and multiple and complex reference. (The first four are in Languages of Art; the fifth is added in Ways of Worldmaking.) The lecture calls these five “functions,” which is not quite his word.
Three tricks for making something function as art
The lecture turns this into three tricks. It describes them as its own ways of reading works, not as Goodman’s. The first turns a thing into an event. In 1929 the Belgian painter René Magritte painted a smooth pipe in a flat illustrative style and wrote under it, in cursive French, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “This is not a pipe.” The painting, called The Treachery of Images, is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Of course it is not a pipe: it is a picture of one. Magritte said as much: could you stuff it? The caption turns a picture into an argument, a small event in the viewer’s mind. The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote an essay on it in 1968 and a book in 1973.
The second turns an event into a thing. The Laocoön in the Vatican shows a Trojan priest and his two sons caught by sea serpents, as Virgil tells it in the Aeneid. It was dug up in January 1506 in a vineyard in Rome, and Michelangelo and the architect Giuliano da Sangallo went to see it. Pliny the Elder wrote of a group by three Rhodian sculptors, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, and Sangallo’s son later recalled his father recognizing it. The right arm was missing when it was found; the original arm turned up in 1905, found by Ludwig Pollak, and was reattached in 1957. In 1766 the German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his Laokoon that an artist must choose “the most fruitful moment,” the one that “allows free play to the imagination.” A whole story is held in one frozen instant.
The third makes something half transparent. In 1965 the American artist Joseph Kosuth showed One and Three Chairs: a real wooden folding chair, a full-size photograph of that chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word “chair.” Each stands for the others and interferes with the others. You cannot look through them as through glass, and you cannot treat them as plain objects. That is the lecture’s “semi-transparent.” It is the lecturer’s own reading, not Kosuth’s term. What the three tricks share is a move from what to when: the work does something at a particular time and place.
Another view
Each account has serious critics. Dickie’s institutional definition has been charged with circularity and vagueness: what is an artworld, and how is it different from any other social system? David Davies noted in 2004 that a “commerceworld” seems to fit the definition as well. Richard Wollheim put a dilemma in 1980: either the artworld’s members have reasons for conferring the status, and then the reasons do the work, or they do not, and the status is arbitrary. Monroe Beardsley argued in 1976 that art is not essentially institutional, and Jerrold Levinson proposed in 1979 that art be defined historically, by relation to earlier art. Critics of Danto ask how history can select what counts when we cannot say which was the first art. The lecture itself admits that authorization is not value, and Dickie would agree, since a candidate is not a winner. Duchamp himself did not credit shock: in a talk at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 he said the choice of readymades rested on “visual indifference” and “a total absence of good or bad taste.” On exemplification, the Stanford Encyclopedia lists open problems in Goodman’s theory: how pictures depict, whether a sample must possess a property before it refers to it, and how musical works are identified. The lecture’s quick “possess and express” blurs several of these.
Closer to home
For readers raised in China, “who says so” has its own history. In the late Ming, the painter and critic Dong Qichang (董其昌, 1555–1636) wrote in his Huachanshi suibi (画禅室随笔) that painting, like Chan Buddhism, had split into a Northern and a Southern school, and then added that the men were not northerners or southerners: 但其人非南北耳. The labels were borrowed from Chan, not drawn from geography. His “Southern” line ran from Wang Wei and Dong Yuan to the four great Yuan masters; the “Northern” line included the Song court painters Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. Literati painting, he wrote, began with Wang Wei: 文人之画，自王右丞始. Many historians, among them James Cahill, treat the scheme as a late-Ming construction that shaped what came to count as literati painting. In China a painting also carried its own committee, in red. Collectors pressed seals on scrolls and wrote colophons beside them, until an emperor’s seals sat on top of everyone else’s. The Qianlong emperor (reigned 1735–96) named a small room in the Forbidden City the Hall of Three Rarities (三希堂, 1746) for three pieces of early calligraphy: Wang Xizhi’s 快雪时晴帖, now in Taipei, and Wang Xianzhi’s 中秋帖 and Wang Xun’s 伯远帖, now in Beijing. The first is generally taken as a fine Tang tracing copy and the second as a Song copy; only the third is generally taken as the writer’s own hand.
Abramović and Ulay also ended their partnership in China. In 1988 each walked toward the other along the Great Wall from opposite ends, she from the Yellow Sea and he from the Gobi Desert, and they met on 27 June at Er Lang Shan in Shenmu, Shaanxi (二郎山), after ninety days, and parted. It is a one-time event, and it is documented in books and an exhibition.
For readers in the United States, the story begins in New York. The Independents’ show took place at the Grand Central Palace in April 1917, and its rule was that any artist paying six dollars could exhibit: an open, no-jury show that still turned one entry away. Warhol’s Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in April 1964 and Danto’s essay six months later carry the argument forward. And the Mona Lisa’s road from admired painting to world icon passed through a theft and the world’s front pages.
What to keep
- Fountain was refused by the show whose rule was to accept everything, photographed, argued over in a small magazine, lost, and only decades later replicated and collected. Authorization came after the fact.
- Wittgenstein’s family resemblance (1953) says games share overlapping similarities, not one common feature. The application to art is Weitz’s (1956). Dickie (1969, 1974) answered with a status: an artifact put forward as a candidate for appreciation. A candidate is not a winner.
- Danto (1964) said what makes the difference between two lookalikes is something the eye cannot see: an artworld, a history. The line from Eliot (1919) to Duchamp is this course’s own. Authorization says what counts, not what is good, and it strains with live performance.
- Goodman (1968, 1977) offered a different question: exemplification is possession plus reference, and the real question is when something works as art. The lecture’s three tricks, a thing as an event, an event as a thing, and the half-transparent, are the lecture’s own readings.
Think it over
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Sources and further reading
- The Blind Man no. 2 (New York, May 1917), “The Richard Mutt Case” (scan on the Internet Archive); William A. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain, Houston Fine Art Press, 1989; Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915–23, Abrams, 1994; Tate and Philadelphia Museum of Art notes on Fountain.
- Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’” talk at the Museum of Modern Art, 19 October 1961, in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Oxford University Press, 1973; Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa, MIT Press, 2002.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell, sections 65–71; Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1956): 27–35; Maurice Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965): 219–228.
- George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1969): 253–256; Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Cornell University Press, 1974; The Art Circle, Haven, 1984.
- Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–584; The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Harvard University Press, 1981; After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1997.
- T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Egoist, 1919, collected in The Sacred Wood, 1920 (Project Gutenberg).
- Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon, Harcourt, 2001; encyclopedia accounts of the 1911 theft.
- Dong Qichang, Huachanshi suibi (画禅室随笔), juan 2, “Huayuan” (画源); James Cahill, “Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s ‘New Orthodoxy’ and the Southern School Theory,” in Susan Bush and others, eds., Artists and Traditions, Princeton University Press, 1976; Chinese encyclopedia entries on the Hall of Three Rarities and the three scrolls.
- Marina Abramović and Ulay, Rest Energy (1980) and The Lovers (1988); the Guggenheim and MoMA pages on Seven Easy Pieces (2005) and The Artist Is Present (2010); Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, Routledge, 1993.
- Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; “When Is Art?” in D. Perkins and B. Leondar, eds., The Arts and Cognition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett, 1978; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Goodman’s Aesthetics.”
- René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1929), Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, University of California Press, 1983.
- Laocoön: Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon (1766), trans. Ellen Frothingham, 1873 (Project Gutenberg); Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965), Museum of Modern Art.
- Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art, Cornell University Press, 1991; Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1980; Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979): 232–250; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Definition of Art.”