With some surprise, as well as some loathing, you report that Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) has been nominated the most influential work of the Twentieth Century by some five-hundred most powerful people in the British art world selected by the all-powerful Tate (”Taking the Pissoir,” No. 45, February 2005). The loathing I understand, at least from your own vantage point. After all, you take painting and sculpture most seriously. But why surprise? Most influential Fountain undoubtedly has been. Whence, I suspect, your loathing. Now, I wonder how he himself would take the news of the Tate’s poll. Taking the piss out of art was his way of calling its end. By 1917, art was on its hind legs already. Instead, his call spawned a new beginning of sorts, where all and sundry started taking the piss out of art. I thus suspect Duchamp would in turn take the piss out of taking the piss out of art. Who knows, the old clown might even have returned to oil and canvass?!