n April 1917 the new Society of Independent Artists in New York opened an exhibition with no jury: anyone who paid the fee could show. A porcelain urinal, turned on its back and signed "R. Mutt 1917", was submitted under the title Fountain and was not shown. The next month a small magazine, The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, printed a photograph of it by Alfred Stieglitz and an unsigned editorial in its defence. (The Blind Man, 1917)

the document

The editorial begins from the rule that had been broken:

“They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit.”
— "The Richard Mutt Case", The Blind Man no. 2, May 1917 (Internet Archive)

and turns on one sentence about authorship:

“Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.”
— ibid. (Internet Archive)

what it says

The editorial moves the artist's act from making to choosing: taking an ordinary object, giving it a new title and point of view, and so creating "a new thought" for it. If that is accepted, the question "did a person make this?" stops settling whether something is art, and is replaced by "did a person choose and frame it?" That substitution is the most direct ancestor of the modern argument that a person who selects, prompts, edits and arranges generated images is their author.

what is contested

Whether the move generalises. The US Copyright Office has, in effect, given a partial answer for law: in its 2023 letter on Zarya of the Dawn and its 2025 report, it protected a person's selection and arrangement of generated images, and the text, but not the images themselves (US Copyright Office, 2023) (US Copyright Office, 2025). Choosing counts; it does not reach back into what was chosen. The art world's answer has been looser. Sol LeWitt's "Paragraphs on conceptual art" (1967) argued that in conceptual art the idea is what produces the work, and carrying it out is routine (LeWitt, 1967) (our paraphrase); generated-image artists often cite the line, and critics reply that LeWitt's ideas were his own and precise, which a prompt may not be.

methodological critiques

The original Fountain is lost, and almost everything known about it comes from the photograph and this magazine, which were made by the people defending it. Read the editorial as advocacy. Its account of the hanging committee is one side's account.

later reception

The replicas made from the 1950s onward are now in museums, which is its own answer to whether the hand mattered. [the house's view] The editorial's claim is strongest as a description of what a viewer is asked to value, and weakest as a claim that nothing else matters. The label experiments on how people respond to machine-made art suggest most viewers still care who did the making, even when told about the choosing.

in the tour: a wing planned for the tour, called "Who made this?", will have a room called “He Chose It” ···

References

1. The Blind Man (1917). No. 2, New York, May 1917. "The Richard Mutt Case" (unsigned editorial). Scan of the Getty Research Institute copy at the Internet Archive. archive.org/details/blindman00unse
2. US Copyright Office (2023). Letter on the registration of Zarya of the Dawn, 21 February 2023. www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf
3. US Copyright Office (2025). Copyright and Artificial Intelligence. Part 1, Digital Replicas (31 July 2024); Part 2, Copyrightability (29 January 2025); Part 3, Generative AI Training (pre-publication version, 9 May 2025). www.copyright.gov/ai/
4. LeWitt (1967). Paragraphs on conceptual art. Artforum 5(10), June 1967. Paraphrased only.

see also