Toilets, Plumbed

The Washington Post

April 08, 1996

Toilets, Plumbed

By Henry Allen

Washington Post Staff Writer

Toilets will never be great art, not even the expensive ones that look like art modern telephones, or the oddly streamlined ones that look as if someone were about to set a world's land speed record with them, or the bluff and British "Deluge" made by Doulton a century ago, with a rectitude that reminds one of the Titanic.

Beautiful maybe, sequestered as they are in the pastoral gloom of bathrooms, but not art. They are becoming a motif in the movies — John Travolta's performance in "Pulp Fiction," or Patricia Arquette's bathroom scene in "Flirting With Disaster," and Elisabeth Shue's in "Leaving…