"Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is a uniquely confounding piece. On the one hand, placed in the context of a gallery, Fountain is validated as a work of art; still the piece does not conform to canonical expectations of how a sculpture should look. The work is ostensibly a porcelain urinal – albeit nonfunctioning – turned ninety degrees on its side. The lone conventionally artistic thing the viewer can discern is the artist’s ‘signature.’ In black paint, Duchamp sloppily scrawled R. Mutt, 1917, effectively completing his visual polemic."