How seeing artist Marcel Duchamp’s urinal Fountain changed the way auctioneer Danielle So thought about art
- When Danielle So was asked about the artwork Fountain during an admissions interview for university, it was the first time she had seen it
- The upside-down urinal with ‘R. Mutt 1917’ written on it changed how she thought about what makes something a work of art
An upturned urinal with the words ‘R. Mutt 1917’ written on it, Fountain (1917) marked a seminal moment in the history of Western art, with the act of declaring a found object to be an artwork transforming it into one.
Danielle So, head of day sale, specialist and auctioneer, 20th century and contemporary art at auction house Phillips, tells Richard Lord how the work by French conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp changed her life.
This was the artwork that kicked off my interest in art during my school years.
I say this because it first came up in an (admissions) interview with a professor at University College London, who showed me Fountain and asked if I had anything to say. Up until that stage I’d never seen it. I was clueless – I’d never considered this question.
I was confronted with this standard urinal, and I didn’t know what to say. It opened up a lot of questions for me: what constitutes a work of art? Who gets to decide? Can it derive from an idea alone or does the hand of an artist have to be involved?
It was a representation of challenging norms, and it turned my idea of art on its head: taking an ordinary object and coining it a work of art.
