In 1917, a young French artist named Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal from a local plumbing-supply store, signed it with a pseudonym and submitted it to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Appalled, the board members refused to display it, despite their lofty claims of an “open-door” policy. 

Fountain would nonetheless come to acquire mythical status in the annals of art history. Documented in a carefully staged photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz, it is now seen as the archetypal “readymade”—an “everyday object raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice,” as Duchamp later wrote. For many critics, it was the moment conceptual art was born.

Though clearly provocative, Duchamp’s prank was also a critical commentary on the art-world apparatus. The essential questions it raised—what makes something valuable and who decides—haven’t lost their relevance more than a century later. A vessel for waste transformed into an object of near-sacred veneration, solely through its selection by the artist? The irony is priceless: or, more accurately, it’s worth millions.

Many artists have gleefully picked up the gauntlet. In the 1960s, Piero Manzoni pushed Duchamp’s provocation to its visceral extreme. For his notorious Artist’s Shit, he canned what he claimed were 90 tins of his own feces, labeled them in four languages, and priced them by weight at the going rate for gold. Collectors couldn’t resist. Decades later, one of these tins fetched over €275,000, making it 100 times more valuable than the metal it was priced against.¹