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How Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain Changed the Course of Art Forever
A disruptive work that continues to inspire and divide
When I was a student of art history, one of the first works that really turned my head and got me thinking about the unusual potency of art was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
It confounded me that a work could reveal so much about what art is “in itself” whilst remaining so resolutely dissimilar to anything I’d ever seen before.
Why so? Because the fundamental motive of Fountain was to call into question how art is defined and to shine a light on the “rules” we use to attach merit and meaning to works of art.
For this reason, I saw it had a strange power, both to affirm and to overturn.
Experts agree: in 2004, a survey of 500 British art world professionals voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential artwork of the 20th century.
So what exactly is it about this beguiling and aesthetically unconventional object that continues to inspire — and divide?
Porcelain Provocation
