artwork fromconsideration. But it must have rankled.
This time around in New York, Duchamp took another
tack. He and a companion retrieved “Fountain” from the
Society of Independent Artists’ storage area and
brought it to Alfred Stieglitz, an eminent American
photographer. They asked Stieglitz to photograph it.
They then reproduced the photograph in an avant-garde
journal titled The Blind Man published, not coincidental-
ly, by Duchamp and some friends. Accompanying the
photograph was an anonymous defense of the work
that read:
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“They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit [in the
show]. Mr. Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion
this article disappeared and never was exhibited. What
were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain?
1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. 2. Others, it
was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. . . .
“Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the foun-
tain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an
ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful signifi-
cance disappeared under a new title and point of view—
creating a new thought for that object.”
Through the force of a well-thought-out idea and
dogged persistence, Duchamp was eventually able to
surmount skepticism, derision—and even hostility—to
see his concept of art fully sink into the art-world
mindset. But it took almost thirty years to do so. By the
1950s, and even more emphatically in the 1960s, it
would not be an exaggeration to say that Duchamp’s
29
contribution to the modern art canon was tantamount
to Albert Einstein’s E = mc2 formulation in physics. Einstein posited that a small amount of mass is convertible into an enormous amount of energy. Duchamp posited that any ordinary object can be converted into that special something called art— assuming that an artist can effectively convince others it is so. To this day, countless artists have based at least part of their artistic practice on this revolutionary principle.
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“The world is full of objects more or less interesting;
I do not wish to add any more. . . .”
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2. Make something from nothing
If, following from Duchamp, art can be created out of
anything, then why can’t it be made out of “nothing”?
Indeed, many artists literally make art out of nothing,
or what at first seems like nothing. (Or make art that
seems to come from “nowhere.”) A quintessential
example of this is an artwork created by John Cage
(1912–92).
Cage’s primary medium was sound. Throughout his
art-making life he was known for creating unorthodox
music, or sonic artworks, that incorporated atonality
and cacophony, or what is sometimes called noise.
As part of his art-making methodology Cage often
incorporated chance or unplanned actions. He used
standard instruments, but in non-standard ways—like
the sound of an orchestra tuning up. He also used
non-instruments like hammers and bolts and screws . . .
and radios for random snippets of talk and music
programming, and for the static between stations.
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Mid-career, Cage had an epiphany: why not create
a composition in which there are no sounds at all?
According to the artist, “[I wanted to] compose a piece
of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co.”
(Muzak, as the company was then named, sold record-
ed “mood music” for different commercial applica-
tions, such as in elevators and department stores.)
For all his apparent emancipation from convention-
ality, Cage was afraid that if he made a piece with no
apparent sounds whatsoever people might think he
was putting them on—and he didn’t want that. Ulti-
mately, two separate but related insights provided
the conceptual grounding he needed to proceed.
The first insight came when viewing the all-white
and all-black paintings of his friend, artist Robert
Rauschenberg. At the time, monochrome paintings like
