Vandal takes hammer to $3 million toilet

Maybe no one ever taught him how to properly use a bathroom facility.

An art activist pensioner has been arrested after attacking Marcel Duchamp's celebrated white porcelain urinal with a hammer while the object, recently voted the most influential modern artwork of all time, was on display as part of an exhibition on Dadaism at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

So a porcelain urinal was voted the most influential modern artwork of all time huh. I've never stopped to truly appreciate them. I've just urinated on them. Silly me. I wonder if Marcel Duchamp knows he has one hell of a copyright infringment lawsuit case?

Following the arrest of Pierre Pinoncelli, 77, it emerged that it was the second time he has attacked Duchamp's urinal, called Fountain, which is valued at 3 million. In 1993 he urinated in it while it was exhibited at the Carré d'Art in the southern city of Nimes.

Oh, he does know how to use them correctly. When you got to go, you got to go. And you have to wonder why Duchamp called it "Fountain". Does that mean Duchamp drank from toilets?
I think we're missing the big picture here and that is this:
Why is a porcelain urinal worth 3 million dollars?
What makes it any different from a normal urinal?

Duchamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it R. Mutt - a pun on the German word for poverty, armut - and submitted it to a New York exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, where it was rejected for not being art.
It illustrates his intention to transform everyday objects into works of art through the simple will of the artist to do so. Duchamp, who died in 1968, is considered the spiritual father of today's postmodern conceptual artists.

So he didn't MAKE the toilet, only signed it in a pun meaning poverty? I wonder if I can steal a sink, sign it R. Hans Kleen and make 3 million dollars. Actually, I don't have the time to play with those artsie people.