the protestation is easy enough to understand. after all, why would it be art? and the answer - because society says so - doesn't provide much comfort. but it seemed to me that he had missed the point.

of course you could take any old object and place it on a pedestal and call it art, but you'd be wrong. the art doesn't exist in the object, not in this case. the art exists in the mind of the viewer. that's what dr. gregory couldn't articulate, and that's what don couldn't understand. by questioning the validity of that urinal on that pedestal, don made it art. he made art, was made into art. duchamp had no sculptural pretenses, made no attempt to lay claim to the design of the piece or its material construction. the physical fact of the urnial serves exactly the function of the canvas beneath a conventional painting - it acts as the context within which the art exists. where a painting would be paint on a canvas, he creates instead thoughts about a urinal.

it becomes art when society as a whole will look at it and think.

the fountain crosses the divide between "art" and "not-art," a divide which our culture defines in a specific way. art, as defined by our professor and society as a whole, is that which has been created for the primary purpose of intellectual and asthetic contemplation. not-art is everything else, and anything with a utilitarian purpose. those things can be well-designed and asthetically pleasing, but they cannot be art.

duchamp's work would have been impossible in a traditional native american society, where every object has been carefully crafted by an individual human being. where even the wallpaper is truly art, worthy of contemplation as well as performing a necessary function.

what i can't figure out is what it says about our culture that the pure inhumanity of our production of goods allowed a brandnew artform to be born.