How Duchamp killed the artist

One of the most controversial instances - "work" would hardly be applicable here - of art remains Duchamp's Fountain. It is surely idiosyncratic for a number of reasons. Adorno wrote about the tension between artefactuality and transcendentality that is present in every work of art and the Fountain is special because it implodes this tension. In history we can find works of art that attempted to hide their artefactuality, for example contemporary productions of the culture industry, or romanticist art that sought to hide the process of production with recourse to ideas of "inspiration" and "genius". The historical avant-garde flaunted artefactuality openly, the institution of art became a focus of reflection, but still the tension persisted, the transcendental character was not eliminated. Duchamp's Fountain goes beyond that, the artefact (an urinal) is not a signifier, but a gesture. The difference is that a signifier points to something in a certain aspect, while a gesture points to it in its totality and idiosyncrasy. If I referr to a "table" I point to the aspect of this object that it shares with all other objects of the same name and by virtue of which they are equivalent. A gesture points to the very specific object with all its idiosyncrasies. The Fountain points to the process of it's own creation as an instance of art, at the space in which an urinal becomes the Fountain. The actual artefact is merely pointing to the process of it's creation, artefactuality taken to it's extreme becomes transcendence. It is the avant-garde in it's purest form, ideal type become flesh. It exhibits unbreakable resistance to the institution of art, in fact the strength of resistance increases proportionally to the force of incorporation. The greatest example are the "replicas" that were made of the urinal and which are displayed as replicas of the Fountain. In one sense this is a vain attempt since the content of the Fountain is not the artefact but the process of its initiation into a work of art and that can not be replicated. In another the replicas are true children of the Fountain - they no longer point to the process of initiation but to the resistance of the institution towards such reflexivity and its vain attempts of suppressing it. Just like the father in Kafka's Judgement the Fountain rises with fierce force just when the replica thought it passivized (I could not find a translation and am not confident enough to attempt one myself, therefore I must apologize to the reader for giving the quote only in german) :

Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich!

Those familiar with the story will know that the father is in no way an emancipatory force, he is a fierce tyrant. It seems we must submit the Fountain to closer scrutiny. It rebels against the institution art and brings the artefactuality of the work of art to the fore, this is its anti-mythical impulse that should be praised, but in the end it turns out to be the mouthpiece against a bad world in the name of one even worse. It rebels against the fact that in myth the artefactual nature of the work of art is concealed (in contemporary movies by the culture industry all aspects of craftsmanship are concealed) but in so doing it sacrifices the subject. Bourgeois aesthetics thought of the artist as a singular genius and thus concealed the social circumstances of the production of art. Duchamp dispenses with this hypocrisy by dispensing with the artist; there is no place for the artists in The fountain, he creates nothing, only selects. The artist becomes nothing more than an agent of the death drive, the need for complete assimilation with the surrounding, indeed the radicalised version of the dialectic of enlightenment. The seemingly radical work is revealed to be nothing more than a radicalised version of the status quo.