Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is not for everyone – and it does not need to be.

But it does encapsulate a central concern in the philosophy of art: What makes something art, and who gets to decide?

Whatever our tastes, art can challenge accepted systems and make us reconsider what we think we know.

Duchamp’s friend and chess partner John Cage observed in 1988, “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” “Fountain” embodies this thinking.

A version of “Fountain” is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection and will appear in the museum’s upcoming Duchamp retrospective, which opens Oct. 10, 2026, and runs through Jan. 31, 2027. The exhibition will revisit Duchamp’s enduring questions about what art is and what it can be.

As an art historian and former Philadelphia Museum of Art staff lecturer, I have developed an intimate knowledge of Duchamp’s art through years of teaching his work. During and after my tenure at the museum, I presented 101 lectures and led 25 gallery-based programs. Some of these focused directly on Duchamp, while others explored broader questions about originality, authorship, intention, skill and value.

These questions are embedded in the remarkable story of “Fountain.”

Courting ‘ready-made’ controversy

The 1917 original “Fountain” survives only in photographs, but 14 authorized full-scale replicas followed. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns the earliest, signed by Duchamp in 1950.

“Fountain” continued a press narrative about Duchamp’s work that had begun four years earlier when his 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” became a sensation at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. Journalist Julian Street remarked that it resembled “the explosion of........

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