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‘The avant-garde can’t be ignored, so to ignore it – as most humanist British novelists do – is the equivalent of ignoring Darwin Then you’re just a creationist’ Tom McCarthy, in an interview with the Guardian     Art has renounced the desire to give form to the world Having ceased to be modern, and finding it too passé to be postmodern, art is now merely contemporary, which seems to mean nothing more then yesterday’s art at today’s prices  Mackenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Streets   There it is, ‘Fountain’, Duchamp’s notorious upturned urinal, signed in black paint R Mutt This one is a facsimile, the original having been lost in New York shortly after its rejection by the Society for Independent Artists in 1917 Today this replica of a readymade sits within a glass box in the Barbican’s art gallery; skeins of tourists surround it, awaiting enlightenment, snapping it on smart-devices, their faces stretched into that look of seriousness that avant-garde art seems uniquely placed to provoke Would Duchamp laugh? I suspect he would   The show in which ‘Fountain’ features brings together several of Duchamp’s most infamous pieces (or at least editions of them) with works by four American artists who loosely define Hal Foster’s neo-avant-garde as outlined in his Return of the Real (1996), namely John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns Viewing the exhibition is a strangely mute, oddly haunting experience Here sat silent behind glass is Rauschenberg’s box of nails, an object that only gains meaning when it is shaken, a Cagean chance experiment in sound the performance of which is said to have evoked the pithy ‘I believe I’ve heard that tune before’ from Duchamp; an anecdote that serves to compound a view of him as the arch European sophisticate to his wide-eyed American puppy dogs  Over there are Cage’s visual scores, deadened under the white light of the sepulchral institution; they are the trace and shell of Cage’s joyful, democratic energy Like the