Only a single photograph of it, by Alfred Stieglitz, survives. The urinal itself was presumably discarded in an early-twentieth-century trash heap, buried among the flotsam and jetsam of a bygone era. The point Duchamp was making, though, lives on. The piece was an in-your-face provocation, one that shook the very foundation of the art world. Today, many art historians consider Fountain to be the single most important work of modern art.
F ou n t a in illustrates how difficult it is to understand success in areas where quality and performance are inherently absent. But I do mean to say that there is no quality in art. I make time to visit contemporary art museums and stop by galleries in every city I travel to. The simple truth is we have no way of objectively determining the value of any work of art or the performance of its maker. And so all forms of art—poetry, sculpture, novels, even a badly executed interpretive dance—are, essentially, priceless.
So how, then, do we explain the myriad of masterpieces that have fetched more than a hundred million dollars in recent decades? We respond by rewarding excellent performers financially and socially, often in disproportionate measure. We can take cues from context and make an educated guess.
One hangs on a kitchen refrigerator, the other on a gallery wall. The Duchampian reality is that these cues shape our perception, frame our understanding, and set the market price. They are also shaped by networks.
I have spent the past two decades documenting how networks work in numerous realms from genetics to business, but until recently, anyway, art was not one of them. So much so that even art world insiders—the very people whose job is to help particular artists on their path to success—often have a limited understanding of why a particular work lands in a major museum or sells for dazzling sums at auction.
But my ears perked up at the end of the meeting, when Sam mentioned that he had access to a massive trove of data pertaining to the art world. The prototype for the replica was developed from technical drawings and modelled in clay drawings and model are owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The replicas were probably manufactured in Europe by a sanitary ware manufacturer using a conventional slip-cast technique.
The sculpture appears to be a hollow fired clay construction with a bluish white glaze typical of mass produced urinals. However the glaze does not appear to have been satisfactory and all the replicas were painted a dense white. Subsequent investigation showed that original paint layers, including a grey alkyd primer and titanium white alkyd top coat, were still present under several alternating layers of nitrocellulose paints and varnishes.
The underside of the sculpture is signed by the artist across the broken wing. A lacquered copper plate with engraved edition details is adhered to the centre of the underside. A similar plate was fixed to all replicas editioned at this time. James Hall. The term readymade was first used by French artist Marcel Duchamp to describe the works of art he made from ….
To coincide with the first exhibition to explore the inter-relationship between Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia, to be staged at …. Main menu additional Become a Member Shop. In Tate Modern. Artist Marcel Duchamp — Medium Porcelain. Collection Tate. Acquisition Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery Reference T Summary Display caption Technique and condition.
Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. Get it? The opposite of poverty.
But not even that much, just R. Camfield , p. We are not even able to consult the object itself, since it disappeared early on, and we have no idea what happened to it … We do not even known with absolute certainty that Duchamp was the artist — he once attributed it to a female friend — and some of his comments raise fundamental questions regarding his intentions in this readymade.
Camfield commented on this reference to a woman: Even if we grant that he did not want his test of the Independents compromised by knowledge that Fountain had been submitted by a director of the organization, why did he mislead his sister in Paris?
This was not intentional, but rather the reality of working with ordinary objects, Remes said. Remes sees it in experimental cinema, in which many filmmakers are questioning the traditional structure of films. For example, Remes is studying films without images — just a blank screen and sound.
You imagine what these things would look like and almost create your own film. The work in question was a porcelain urinal that Duchamp quizzically flipped onto its back, signed with a mysterious nom de plume , and called Fountain. The analogy to chess is more than merely fanciful. So obsessed in fact he forfeited significant pieces of his personal and creative life to its pursuit. In November , after having, years earlier, shifted his energies entirely from making art to playing chess, his new wife Lydie had had enough of his incessant strategizing of moves and countermoves.
One night, while he was sleeping, she glued the pieces of his set to the board. They divorced a month later. To understand how Duchamp managed to outmanoeuvre the art world, one needs to return to the moment that the scurrilous sculpture arrived for consideration at the recently formed Society of Independent Artists in New York in spring , in advance of an exhibition due to open on 10 April.
When Fountain was rejected by fellow members on grounds of aesthetic crudity, Duchamp found his conscience suddenly cornered.
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