Readymades of Marcel Duchamp to turn up any identical matches to photographs of the originals. However, there are accounts of Walter Arensberg and Joseph Stella being with Duchamp when he purchased the original "Fountain" at J. L. Mott Iron Works. Such investigations are hampered by the fact that few of the original "readymades" survive, having been lost or destroyed. Those that still exist are predominantly reproductions authorized or designed by Duchamp in the final two decades of his life. Shearer also asserts that the artwork "L.H.O.O.Q." which is recorded to be a poster-copy of the "Mona Lisa" with a moustache drawn on it, is
Fountain (Duchamp) object. Menno Hubregtse argues that Duchamp may have chosen "Fountain" as a readymade because it parodied Robert J. Coady's exaltation of industrial machines as pure forms of American art. Coady, who championed his call for American art in his publication "The Soil", printed a scathing review of Jean Crotti's "Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (Sculpture Made to Measure)" in the December 1916 issue. Hubregtse notes that Duchamp's urinal may have been a clever response to Coady's comparison of Crotti's sculpture with "the absolute expression of a—plumber." Some have contested that Duchamp created "Fountain", but rather assisted in submitting the piece to