Darkly amusing: Marcel Duchamp may have swiped the piece that made the 20th-century’s ‘conceptual’ [more accurately: ‘anti-conceptual’] and postmodern art world giddy: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/oct/15/conceptualist-art-fountain-is-fake-say-historians-marcel-duchamp
Related: My “Why Art Became Ugly” article, explaining the evolution and devolution of high art’s variants during the 1900s The article was first published in 2004, based on a 2003 lecture in New York City.
“For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the “Isn’t that disgusting” strategy. By that I mean the strategy of pointing out that given works of art are ugly, trivial, or in bad taste, that ‘a five-year-old could have made them,’ and so on. And they have mostly left it at that. The points have often been true, but they have also been tiresome and unconvincing—and the art world has been entirely unmoved.
“Of course, the major works of the twentieth-century art world are ugly. Of course, many are offensive. …”
Read the full piece here.
How can you cite–without question–the conspiracy theory that Duchamp stole the idea of the urinal? The facts of the case are willfully ignored by the conspirators, and you are doing precisely the same thing in referring to their convoluted theory blindly without challenge. Clearly you have not kept up with the literature on the subject, or you would never have done that (or maybe you would, for all I know, you might like the idea of perpetuating conspiracy theories). If you are interested in reading an opposing point of view, see the series of articles compiled last year by the late Alistar Brotchie and placed online: https://atlaspress.co.uk/marcel-duchamp-was-not-a-thief/.
Do you not see, Francis, the question mark in the title?