Duchampian News & Views

Marcel Duchamp: Reinventing the Wheel

Author : marcelduchamp_admin Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917 Image Source

"The object in Tate Modern is white and shiny, cast in porcelain, its slender upper part curving outward as it descends to a receiving bowl – into which I urinate. It’s just a brief walk from here in the fifth-floor men’s loo to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, an object sealed in a plastic display case on a plinth that is nevertheless almost identical to the receptacle into which I’ve just pissed…. Duchamp warned against an attitude of ‘aesthetic delectation’ that would transfigure his urinal into something artistic. Yet, as a visual form, it is bizarrely lovely, so white and incongruously ethereal, and as art it is … well, there’s a question already tripping me up. Is it art?"

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