It’s not difficult these days to find people newly initiated into appreciating old things with eyes wide and shining as they enter galleries filled with treasures taken from the storehouses of history. More commonly, the galleries are virtual, the wonders are digitized, and the wandering admirers are fully online reactionaries juggling traditionalist semiotics. Understandably, many new traditionalists—an oxymoron if there was one—are eager to affirm the goodness of what they have discovered in our inheritance. And yet, they are also strangely ignorant of it. Like new converts to an old faith, their often childish affirmations ring out joyfully while tinged with literalist fundamentalism. They aren’t so bothered by the complexities of grown-up interpretations; perhaps they can be forgiven for this.
I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but this has been most evident to me in many online posts by new reactionaries about aesthetics, about art and architecture especially. You’ll find one person boasting about his newly discovered appreciation for old things by dissing all things modern. Then you’ll find someone else declaring that beauty is objective while casting before your eyes some obviously hideous modern artwork to drive the point home. The contest is easily won when you’re working from an unexamined intuition. These are the days of dead arguments, statements propounded and repeated ad nauseam as substitutes for arguments. And yet I wonder how anyone can honestly, so unselfconsciously and unironically, affirm tradition against all things modern, even while they post their thoughts on such a blatantly non-traditional thing as social media. In this age of ironies, the performative contradiction doesn’t bother them. Perhaps this is because it has not occurred to them that it is really a performative contradiction.
Not so long ago, a post went viral in which a certain well-read and usually thoughtful individual offered his followers a kind of cheat sheet, a spreadsheet of sorts, to help them discern between good and bad art. The result was particularly cringeworthy as he reduced the so-called objectivity of aesthetic beauty to entirely subjective feelings. If you feel weird, sapped of your energy, and confused, as opposed to uplifted, energized, and clear-headed—this is what he proposed on his spreadsheet—then, apparently, you’re dealing with bad art. And yet the author of the cringe-post in question insisted that the measure is entirely subjective. With one simple application of a category error, he confused mere sentimentality about art with the power of beauty to make us think less about ourselves.
Perhaps no example of supposedly “bad art” is more egregious in the eyes of naive traditionalists than Duchamp’s famous 1917 work, Fountain, a urinal purchased at a plumbing outlet and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt. One online comment I read recently said: “This is the worst piece of ‘art’ in human existence, and it’s unironically evil.” Another said, “Modern art destroys classical ideas of beauty because it CANNOT compete with them.”
Every now and then, someone will pipe up, in a similar manner, yelling into the digital void about the terrible blight on art that is Duchamp’s Fountain. Perhaps rightly, they identify it as the source of so many subsequent artistic catastrophes. And, to be very honest, often, especially when certain newer human creations are juxtaposed against older human creations, I feel intuitively compelled to agree by screaming my agreement like some demon-possessed sports fan at that app on my cell phone. But the more thoughtful part of myself, which tends to win out more often as I get older, knows that these credulous art critics are wrong. I’m on their side, in a way, but I don’t agree with them, at least not in the way you’d perhaps expect.
To be clear, Duchamp’s Fountain is not my favorite piece of art; not even close. I would much rather spend time contemplating Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, as Henri Nouwen does in his book of the same title, or sitting for an hour or two, as I have been lucky to do, in front of John Constable’s beautiful Haywain. The last time I was in the Tate Modern in 2019, looking at a 1964 copy of Duchamp’s Fountain by Duchamp himself, I was more than aware of just how dull and uninspiring it was, standing on the side of one room on a white pedestal looking an awful lot like a display at a plumbing supplies store. And yet, even with this in mind, I still have a problem with the spreadsheet aesthete who thinks it’s possible to divide art into columns with neat categories of what’s great and what’s rubbish. Such spreadsheetism simplistically equates what’s old with what’s good and what’s new with what’s bad.
In opposition to this, I have in mind the Scrutonian idea that to be properly traditional—to be faithful, that is, to the many good things we have inherited from a bygone age—one has to be modern. We can interpret this idea in a number of ways, but one of them is this: to be properly appreciative, in theory, and in practice, of what is traditional, we have to have some clarity on our present place and condition and of the fact that we are looking at the past from this very place and our of a heavily conditioned consciousness. We’re not living in the past but in the present, in the so-called metamodern world with its largely nihilistic sensibilities. This means our view of what happened long ago is filtered through our enwired and enworlded existence. To be properly traditional, I would say, requires seeing tradition less as something that happened, evident by some process of efficient causality in the present, than as a telos. Tradition goes ahead of us and draws us into its world vision if we’re open to it, that is.
I will spare you complex arguments about aesthetics, but I nevertheless want to present something of a defense of Duchamp’s little artistic monstrosity. I am defending it even though it’s a bit stupid. I’m defending it because I’m glad it happened. I can appreciate it, in a way, even if I am not a fan.
We know that in 1917, that infamous artist put a urinal into an art exhibition, signed it with a name that didn’t belong to him, and gave it a poetic rather than a literal name. He didn’t call it Urinal but Fountain. The crudity of the work was not erased by this nominalist addition, but that doesn’t seem to have been Duchamp’s aim anyway. The artwork is a readymade, which means Duchamp didn’t even sculpt it. Duchamp then submitted that readymade for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to which he belonged, for the first annual exhibition by the Society, which was staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York. He did this anonymously since he was a member of the board.
Initially, the Society of Independent Artists met the work with disdain. They didn’t think it was worthy of being thought of as art either. But their rules dictated that anyone who submitted a piece for their exhibition and paid the entry fee could exhibit their work. A major component of their philosophy, which Duchamp wanted to openly mock, was their claim that America was at the forefront of artistic innovation. The rest, as they say, is history.
I have listened to art historians discuss Duchamp’s Fountain in terms of its sculptural qualities, in terms of the fact that he was taking something ordinary and viewing it as if it was art, in terms of the way he took artistic conventions and inverted them, in terms of its supposed revaluation of values, and so on. The typical suggestion even by certain art historians and art fundis, is that it is such art-like features in the object itself that make it art. There may be some value to such perspectives, but I want to focus on something else.
Do they not see that Duchamp was joking? Imagine the scene. You’re at an art exhibition, and right there, displayed as if it is a sculpture (when it clearly isn’t), is the very same object you, if you’re a guy that is, will urinate into later when you’ve had too many glasses of exhibition wine. Duchamp is taking the piss. His fake, crude artwork has been signed instead of urinated into as a way to mark territory (although anonymously, which deconstructs this very idea), and it’s displayed differently from how it is set up in a bathroom. But that’s all part of the quirk of the object. The right response is to laugh, although I don’t expect you to since I’ve now done the worst thing possible; I’ve explained the joke. Still, it’s funny that some cheeky little chess-loving Frenchman managed to get this nonsensical little so-called artwork displayed at an exhibition precisely because he played by the rules. He played by the rules to break the rules. Well done, Marcel! And, as I said, he was mocking the Americans who thought themselves to be artistically progressive when they were, at least in Duchamp’s mind, pretty stuck in their ways.
It’s funnier still that instead of being a little temporal blip on the artistic radar, the joke stuck. Granted, it took a while for this to happen. At first, the critics regarded the urinal with as much respect as the naïve reactionary. It was thrown away. But Duchamp got people to talk about it. With the help of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of that vulgar readymade and some assistance from a Dada publication or two, the fame of Fountain grew. It was only in the 1960s that Duchamp was commissioned to make 17 replicas of the original artwork, and it was one of these I saw in the Tate Modern. The fame of his original had caught on, and it had to be objectified because that’s something that tends to need to happen with artwork. It was marketing ingenuity that made all the difference.
Jump ahead a few decades, almost a century after the Fountain was first displayed, and you find, in 2004, that a poll involving 500 art experts voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential modern artwork of the 20th century. That’s quite a promotion for a urinal! This has been taken too seriously by the art establishment, but it’s just Duchamp’s joke being retold in a different register and with a different accent, all while people fail to see it as a joke. The supposedly smart art critics have elevated something made by a plumbing supplies factory over every other artwork created by every talented artist of the 20th century.
It is here that we might learn to appreciate the brilliance of Duchamp’s little piece of toilet humor. By submitting the artistic equivalent of garbage to that exhibition and then later capitalizing on some marketing acumen, Duchamp alerted everyone to the fact that what gave any artwork legitimacy was not so much the object as the context. Put differently, what matters is not so much the picture as the frame. What gave the artwork its power was the framing provided by the art gallery, the art world, and the entire history of art. In his The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Žižek puts it this way: “Perhaps the most succinct definition of the modernist break in art is thus that, through it, the tension between the (art) Object and the Place it occupies is reflectively taken into account: what makes an object a work of art is not simply its direct material properties, but the place it occupies.” Žižek suggests that when the Place is hallowed and rendered sacred, the Object gains a special importance.
Duchamp’s artwork functions less as a simple extension of the usual expectations than as an event. It challenged the frame and therefore (at least potentially) made people aware of it but also, by existing in reference to that frame, affirmed its own place within it. It was a joke but with a serious point. The point was taken particularly seriously by the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan who came to see more clearly than many around him, and many around us still today, that the content of a medium is always less significant than its form when it comes to thinking about the effects of media. To use an analogy, it is the fact of reading itself that shapes consciousness more than the content of the things we are reading. And when a new medium arrives on the scene, it transforms the ground; it creates an entirely new environment. Add a new invention, and you don’t just get a new invention; you get a new world. Well, that is precisely what Duchamp did. He changed the entire art scene by installing something he didn’t make, signed with a name that wasn’t his, and which, by any standard logic, really should not have been considered art.
The thing is, though, that the basic Duchampian logic is evident everywhere. Things and people acquire an aura often because of the way they are framed. A normal human being is framed by the cinema or the media, and so becomes a celebrity or star. As Apple, in particular, has taught us, you can frame a smartphone in a particular way, through various kinds of advertising, to render it somehow more than just a smartphone. It can become an object of envy and desire. Somehow, even the most banal new feature can seem like a life-altering event. Wow, a rose gold phone! Woah, a pressure-sensitive screen! None of this novelty is inherently amazing. Framing is a powerful thing.
A band is framed by a stage, and “VIP” passes and so achieves a kind of aura of sacredness. The crown jewels, a bunch of rocks put together nicely but still a bunch of rocks, are framed by all the pomp and ceremony and royalty and, yes, the Tower of London itself and its security, and so it becomes something tourists will queue for hours to see. A sports event is framed by the stadium and the expense of the ticket and so becomes all the more “special”. It’s even possible to create an aura around a CEO or boss of the company when he or she is “framed” by the secretary that you have to call to make an appointment. Arguably, even the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would have seemed more special to Eve and Adam in the Genesis story because it was framed by the serpent as such.
I could go on, but instead, I want to go backward. Duchamp’s Fountain is significant, at least partly, because it has a demythologizing function. It takes the invisible mythical structure of the art world and exposes it. In a way, what I’m doing here is similar to what Duchamp did, only I’m demythologizing Duchamp’s demythologizing. What happened in and beyond Duchamp was something similar, given that the art world started to follow his lead. However, it did so by latching on, I would say mistakenly, to the sheer novelty of the event. They mistook the joke for a paradigm. What was great about Duchamp’s work, many subsequent artists thought, was not so much the way it called attention to the frame as its newness. Modernity has always had a novelty fixation, and this was the epitome of that.
But to my mind, fixating on the novelty at the expense of the evental character of Duchamp’s exposure of the picture-frame relation, or the medium-message relation (to think in a McLuhanite manner), is a mistake. Is there no way to adopt Duchamp’s Fountain less as a model of subversion and demythologization than as a reminder of our need to appreciate things? Is there not a way, I mean, to think of it as a lens through which we can better appreciate what art has been and can be? This is what a modern traditionalist might do to avoid the naivety often confused with traditionalism. One way to do this is to adopt the work less as a deconstruction of tradition than as evidence of a deep appreciation of tradition.
Without tradition, after all, Duchamp is nothing. You cannot see Duchamp’s work clearly without having a sense of the history of art. Its humorousness—I almost said humorosity, and perhaps I should have—is invisible without its being in tension with the tradition. This is precisely what struck me, in fact, when I saw Duchamp’s Fountain in the Tate Modern when I visited it in London back in 2019. There is no tension and no contrast there. The urinal is on display, quite separate from other artworks. It looks uninspired. But why? Well, because there it is juxtaposed with so many things that have simply followed its lead. It is juxtaposed with everything that is just more of the same.
Instead of recognizing the hermeneutical brilliance of throwing context into sharp relief, many artists have taken Duchamp’s work in the shallowest possible way. They have rendered it a formula: find something standard and subvert it, and there, where standardization is subverted, your artwork will be! Novelty-obsessed progressives are, in this, an echo of naïve reactionaries. They fail to notice that the only way to move properly forward is to know what you’re leaving behind. It’s to know that you can never really leave the tradition. You are bound to it, just as you are bound to the contingencies of your own time. Duchamp’s work was created as art precisely because it was tied to tradition, precisely because of how aware Duchamp was of the entire context within which all meaning is encountered.
Yes, it looks pathetic where it is now, and by now, it should be clear that I am in no way defending how so many modern artists used this work as a technique and formula to live by. But even the sad look of that Fountain now is only evident because we have taken it out of its historical frame. The honest traditionalist, who is by no means not modern and who is by all means desirous of interpretive subtlety, is the person who will put it back where it belongs and accord it a sense of proportion that isn’t overly overblown. The mature traditionalist will not ask stupid questions about whether it is art or evil or not, but will ask, in hermeneutical fashion: What does it mean that Duchamp did what he did, and what could it mean for us now?
