Quote Originally Posted by Chemical View Post
I'll give a little context.

The work is actually by Marcel Duchamp.

And actually it didn't show in a gallery.

What happened was that Duchamp (brilliant artist and master chess player) submitted it to a Society of Independent Artists (under the pesudo name R. Mutt) who put a call for submission and claimed they would accept any work submitted. Funny enough Duchamp was on that board of directors of this Society of Independent Artists... even funnier... was that the 'work' was rejected.

And to answer your question Genji... you would just pee in it if you really wanted to... but the artwork was strategically placed so that the piping points at you... consequently if you chose to pee in the urinal you'd end up peeing all over your own shoes.

This urinal now exists as a piece of artwork. Not as conventional, aesthetically pleasing, stereotypical paint on canvas art but as Conceptual art where the ideas and self-reflexive nature are more important.

It forces the questions. What makes art? What is art? What is 'true' art? Who defined true art? (the answer is uperclass white people) Why can't this be art? And further more it placed the critics in an insulting and degrading position where they were exposed to piss all over themselves with their own self-righteous conservitism. They fought for the freedom of art but clutched onto its conventions so desprately.



PS.
HSU: your stereotype hurts my brain. I'm a Fine Arts Major in Criticism & Curatorial practices. It's no longer 1975... beatniks are all in old age homes and Post-Modernism is dead.
Yeah we had this in a lecture but I wasn't paying attention for a change.

I'm an Art History major but I don't hold much interest in the last 200 years of art. The 300 years before that is what I'm (reasonably) good at.