That Sinking Feeling: When Kohler invited Mary Ellen Carroll to its factory to make sculpture, it didn't bargain on her real ambition

摘要

The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges," Marcel Duchamp famously proclaimed - which accounts for the white porcelain urinal he submitted in 1917 to the inaugural exhibition of the Society for Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp's spectacular act of recontextualization is credited with launching conceptual art. As recently as 2004, a large group of experts voted it modern art's most influential work.