With Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' voted the most influential work of modern art, it seems that art can be anything we want it to be, writes Aidan Dunne
When 500 contemporary artists, critics, curators and dealers were asked what they regarded as the most influential work of modern art, they opted for a mass-produced urinal, exhibited by Marcel Duchamp in 1917. Perhaps the sponsors of the poll, Gordon's, suspected the participants had been sampling the product, and the public at large might think exactly the same thing. But, oddly enough, it's true: Duchamp's urinal, titled Fountain and signed - by the artist - with the name of the manufacturer, R Mutt, has cast a long shadow over the art of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
In fact, the capsule view of modern art history has it that while the first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, the second goes to Duchamp. Or, to put it another way, in the long run Duchamp won the argument.
What is especially significant about Fountain is the boldness of Duchamp's gesture of appropriation. He effectively established that you could take anything and declare it to be art. The implications were enormous, but they were not really explored until the 1960s, with the advent of pop art and, more significantly, conceptual art.
Much of the output of the Saatchi generation of British artists depends on Duchamp's original achievement, for example. So much so that Damien Hirst's shark and Tracey Emin's bed are, in historical terms, footnotes to Duchamp. The generation that first rediscovered Duchamp, in the late 1960s, adopted a serious, even solemn approach to conceptual art, but when the Saatchi artists and American counterparts such as Jeff Koons arrived on the scene, they gave conceptualism an ironic, pop spin. But then once you accept the principle you can play around with it in any number of ways. Anything and everything, it seems, might be art.
But is it? Andy's Warhol's multiple, silk-screened portrait of Marilyn Monroe came third in the Gordon's poll. In the 1960s, it was Warhol's work that led the philosopher Arthur Danto to reconsider what art was.
His highly influential definition was that a work of art is something that embodies a meaning. That may seem a bit miscellaneous, a bit of a non-definition, but there is a sting in the tail. "Nothing," he concluded, "is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such."
Picasso has by no means been banished altogether. He features in second and fourth in the poll, for his Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica, his epic memorial to the bombing of a market town during the Spanish Civil War.
The power of Guernica, a work that combines formal austerity and exceptional humanity, is that it not only looks backwards but seems to stand as a fitting elegy for the suffering of ordinary people throughout the whole violent century.
Both Picasso and Braque had laid the foundations of Cubism by the time the former painted Les Demoiselles, but it was his monumental painting and it deservedly achieved iconic status. Most importantly, perhaps, its evident roughness, urgency and rawness are appropriate to the way Cubism definitively fractured the coherent, illusionistic approach to space and form that had underpinned Western painting for centuries.
There was a friendly rivalry between Picasso and Henri Matisse. It might seem amazing that nobody at all named a work by Matisse, a hugely popular artist, as being the most influential (overall he came in fifth place), but that has a lot to do with the fashions of our time. Matisse made no bones about the fact that he wanted his paintings to provide pleasure. They should delight the eye and the mind, they should be enjoyable, good to look at - in a word, beautiful. And beauty as an end in itself is virtually taboo in the world of contemporary art. It can only be an incidental attribute of a work pursuing some other agenda, a means to an end.
Other significant art movements feature in the top 10 choices. One of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist drip paintings came in at number eight. Uncompromising minimalist Donald Judd was number nine. The shaman-like German artist Joseph Beuys, an enormous influence on contemporary performance and installation artists, was number six. Surprising, relatively conventional sculptures - a long way from Fountain - by Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore also featured, in seventh and 10th place respectively. The main point of the poll is that it provides a snapshot of the current thinking in the art world. As such, it suggests that Duchamp's influence still prevails.