ANECDOTES: Fontaine (New York 1917)

To any lord, any honour. It is with Marcel Duchamp and his mythical work "Fontaine" that this series of anecdotes on Art begins.

For this upside-down urinal has an unusual history that poses the paradox that can be considered the founder of conceptual art. Signed under the assumed name of R. Mutt, it was proposed for exhibition at the New York Society of Independents, of which Duchamp was at the time a director. This was in 1917. This association had no declared aesthetic taboos. Paying six dollars was enough to become a member.

The Société des Indépendants nonetheless refused the work on the grounds that the object was "immoral and vulgar" and that it did not constitute "a work of art, by any definition" but belonged to "the art of the plumber". History will remember that with this ready made, Marcel Duchamp defined a work of art not by the technical virtuosity of an artist in its execution, but by the way he looks at it when it is finished, when he declares in a vacuum, but aware of what his time is: "This is Art".

Like a painter, standing back from a painting, who tells himself that one more brushstroke would be one too many. One day, in an exhibition, I unexpectedly came across one of the few authorised reproductions of Fontaine. I didn't think that a ceramic object could give me such a feeling.

I'm not talking about the namby-pamby emotion that is summed up in the apprehension of a work of art in these days of experiential and immersive triumphs with a public that anaesthetises its brain behind its VR mask. No, I'm talking about the sensual thrill of a work's meaning, its symbolic charge, its ability to change our outlook or to have changed, like Fontaine, our lives.