[thu2111]

Yeah. The debate over Fountain is really a proxy for wider and more important debates about social class, the value of labour etc.

When someone can take a toilet, say it's art, and then it sells for >$10 million, it feels to a lot of people like some parts of society are just deliberately mocking them, rubbing their face in it. They're so rich they can flush $10 million on what looks like trying to grab some brief attention, or be what we now call a social influencer, whilst many other people who work hard every day to develop some truly difficult craft end up with far less or nothing.

Nobody who hates Fountain hates it because it's "not art". They hate it because someone managed to convince a whole lot of rich people to pay them way over the odds for a toilet. It looks and feels like some sort of long con.

[dTal]

This is my main problem with the "but you didn't" objection. I could have made that, in the sense that I am clever and imaginative and creative enough to look at a toilet and say "wouldn't it be funny to take this toilet and put it in a museum and call it art". It's not a high bar. I could not have made that, in the sense that I lack the power to get things into museums, no matter how much artistic merit they have, and the existence of Fountain confirms that this skill is orthogonal to creating things people want to look at.

Damien Hirst takes this mockery you mention and makes it the very focus of his "art". He took a skull and coated it in diamonds and called it "For the love of god". Even the title seems to say "jesus, how far can I push this?"