It is a urinal, turned upside down and signed by Duchamp. In the 1900's art was art there wasn't anything particularly exiting about it, it was all technique with no real pass
…ion. But then a man came along with his radical ideas about what art should be. He thought art shouldn't just be about a big picture but about a very small one. The man that virtually changed the future of art forever name is Marcel Duchamp. In 1917 he gave the art community the biggest shock its ever had. He conceived the art work titles "Fountain" for a show promoting Avant-garde art. He entered under the pseudonym R. Mutt as a prank to his other avant-garde artists and. But for the art coordinators it was "misplaced" for the duration of the exhibition and lost soon after. People were not accustomed to the radical thinking of Marcel in those times and his work wasn't really accepted until the early 1960's though there were great steps taken just after ww2. I think his work was more accepted because people had gotten time to be use to the idea, people are a lot open minded in the later decades of the 1900's Like all artists he started off just doing painting but soon he was thinking about others ideas. Finally he started using already constructed materials and changing or contorting the idea of what they were to an almost unrecognisable state. What he did was at the time rejected and even ridiculed. He decided to pit a urinal fountain and call it "art". People that saw it didn't understand it was to foreign. People depended on that something had to mean SOMETHING it couldn't just be they wanted his art to be significant or at least signify or have meaning. BY Lily Davis It is one of the best known examples of Dadaism's 'anti-art'. This anti-art was a rejection of art and it's purpose was to make fun of current art. Often used found objects, like the urinal Duckamp used in Fountain, and opposed anything that at the time was considered real art. (MORE) 
