In December of 2004 Mary Higgins of the British newspaper The Guardian reported that five hundred of Britain's artists, critics, dealers and curators had named Marcel Duchamp's Fountain as the world's most influential work of art. Fountain was a ceramic urinal of the type found in any men's restroom that Duchamp had purchased, signed "R. Mutt" and entered into the Society of Independent Artists' 1917 show in New York City. Much of today’s art can trace its origin to the urinal and to Duchamp's "ready-mades" that he continued to display throughout the city. ¹

One might asterisk "work of art" in this context, since many have labeled Duchamp's ready-mades anti-art. His intent in 1917 seems to have been to undermine the "fine art" world by attacking its elitist showcase (the gallery), its formal qualities (academic training, craft, aesthetic judgment) its commercial goals and its bourgeois themes. That his anti-art statement should eventually become mainstream is slightly amusing, certainly ironic, but also a little troubling. What Fountain declared was that there need not be a physical connection between the artist and the finished work. The idea was everything, the object nothing. And by extension whatever "art" existed in the urinal was not made or constructed, but found or "assigned". As critic Simon Wilson declared to The Guardian in 2004,  "... the Duchampian notion that art can be made of anything has taken off. And not only about formal qualities, but about the 'edginess' of using a urinal...".

Skip ahead four decades to Andy Warhol's Factory in New York. A successful commercial artist, Warhol blurred the distinction between fine and commercial art by raising consumer commodities to the level of cultural icon. He attacked America's materialism and self-promotion, and America loved it. His fame attracted a coterie of hangers-on and wannabes, as well as art students who became his assistants. At his direction they proceeded to manifest his ideas, producing images whose connection to Warhol was in principle only. Like Duchamp, the art was in the creative process not the product.²

So we have reached a point at which one needs no special training to make art; indeed, we do not even need the

artifact. Art has become conceptual.

          "Conceptual Art has the same 'patron saint' as Pop Art: Marcel Duchamp. It arose during the1960’s out of the

          Happenings ...in which the event itself became the art. Conceptual Art challenges our definition of art more

          radically than Pop, insisting that the leap of the imagination, not the execution, is art. According to this view

          works of art can be dispensed with altogether, since they are incidental by-products of the imaginative leap.”³

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I first began to articulate my concerns about where Conceptual art was leading us when I visited the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton with a group of my students. On display was a show originating from the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound in 1997 by curator Andrew Hunter. Hunter had concentrated on two Canadian cultural icons; the painter Tom Thomson, who died under mysterious circumstances in Canoe Lake in 1917, and Toronto Maple Leaf hockey player Bill Barilko. Barilko's plane was lost in the Ontario forest in 1951, mere weeks after he had scored the winning goal in the Stanley Cup final. Memorabilia, artifacts and paintings were on display in an attempt to recapture the period. Hunter had prepared the show catalogue in novel form, in the manner of a "dime store thriller".⁴ In it he explored his youth in "..half remembered stories..,” and clearly was the centre of the show. And my students got it. When asked what he thought the show was about, one teenager piped up "Andrew Hunter"! Now I have no beef with the curator -I've never met him - but I do object to his use of an artist's works as mere illustrations. One can be sure that Tom Thomson had no thoughts of ice hockey, Bill Barilko or Andrew Hunter while creating his landscapes.

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In undermining the formal qualities associated with the creation of art, and in separating the artist from the created object, the art world has legitimized those who "borrow" from others. In the 1980's it was called "appropriating" so as to remove the act from the ethical realm. It is but a short step from appropriating art to employing the art of others to illustrate your own ideas. In subsequent years I have come across similar exhibits, in which the Curator, rather than taking a back seat, drives the show. He uses the art of others to illustrate his themes, themes that may have no connection to the artist's original intent. And in doing so, he diminishes what another has worked to achieve. Such a trend is distressing, and its demise cannot come too soon.

1 An informative essay on Duchamp and Fountain was authored by Alan Antliff and published in the summer issue of Canadian Art

(2006). It also can be found at www.canadianart.ca/art/features/2006/05/15/438/

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

3 "Conceptual Art" in History of Art. 5th ed. 1991. pp. 841.

4 John Armstrong in "Up North: A Northern Ontario Tragedy", http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/a/armstrong/armO20t.html