And what does another artist do when confronted with all this? Brian Eno, musician, producer, and visual artist in his own right, decided to treat Fountain not philosophically, but rather literally. At Dangerous Minds, Martin Schneider writes up the story as heard from a 1993 interview on European television. Seeing Duchamp’s by-then-sacred urinal on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

    "I thought, how ridiculous that this particular … pisspot gets carried around the world at—it costs about thirty or forty thousand dollars to insure it every time it travels. I thought, How absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is, “You can take any object and put it in a gallery.” It doesn’t have to be that one, that’s losing the point completely. And this seemed to me an example of the art world once again covering itself by drawing a fence around that thing, saying, “This isn’t just any ordinary piss pot, this is THE one, the special one, the one that is worth all this money.”

    "So I thought, somebody should piss in that thing, to sort of bring it back to where it belonged. So I decided it had to be me."




posted 3133 days ago