* 
The Richard Mutt Case 
Now Mr. Mutt's fountam is not 
immoral, that is absurd, no more than 
a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that 
you see every day in plumbers' show windows. 
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands 
made the fountain or not has no importance. 
He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article 
of life, placed it so that its useful significance 
disappeared under the new title and point of 
view—created a new thought for that object. 
As for plumbing, that is absurd. 
The only works of art America 
has given are her plumbing and 
her bridges. 
u Buddha of the Bathroom” 
They say any artist paying 
six dollars may exhibit. 
Mr. Richard 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 im 
moral, vulgar. 
2. Others, it was plagiarism, a 
plain piece of plumbing. 
I suppose monkeys hated to lose their 
tail. Necessary, useful and an ornament, 
monkey imagination could not stretch to a 
tailless existence (and frankly, do you see 
the biological beauty of our loss of them?), 
yet now that we are used to it, we get on 
pretty well without them. But evolution 
is not pleasing to the monkey race; “there 
is a death in every change” and we monkeys 
do not love death as we should. We are 
like those philosophers whom Dante placed 
in his Inferno with their heads set the 
wrong way on their shoulders. We walk 
forward looking backward, each with more 
of his predecessors’ personality than his 
own. Our eyes are not ours. 
The ideas that our ancestors have joined 
together let no man put asunder! In La 
Dissociation des Idees, Remy de Gour- 
mont,,quietly analytic, shows how sacred is 
the'marriage of ideas. At least one charm 
ing thing about our human institution is 
that although a man marry he can never 
be only a husband. Besides being a money 
making device and the one man that one 
woman can sleep with in legal purity with 
out sin he may even be as well some other 
woman’s very personification of her ab 
stract idea. Sin, while to his employees he 
is nothing but their “Boss,” to his children 
only their “Father,” and to himself cer 
tainly something more complex. 
But with objects and ideas it is different. 
Recently we have had a chance to observe 
their meticulous monogomy. 
When the jurors of The Society of In 
dependent Artists fairly rushed to remove 
the bit of sculpture called the Fountain 
sent in by Richard Mutt, because the object 
was irrevocably associated in their atavistic 
minds with a certain natural function of a 
secretive sort. Yet to any “innocent” eye