To our way of think­ing, the ques­tion is not whether Mar­cel Duchamp con­ceived of Foun­tain, history’s most famous uri­nal, as art or prank.

Nor is it the ongo­ing con­tro­ver­sy as to whether the piece should be attrib­uted to Duchamp or his friend, avant-garde poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven.

The ques­tion is why more civil­ians don’t head for the men’s room armed with black paint pens (or alter­na­tive­ly, die-cut stick­ers) to enhance every uri­nal they encounter with the sig­na­ture of the non-exis­tent “R. Mutt.”

The art world bias that was being test­ed in 1917, when the signed uri­nal was unsuc­cess­ful­ly sub­mit­ted to an unjuried exhi­bi­tion at the Soci­ety of Inde­pen­dent Artists, has not van­ished entire­ly, but as cura­tor Sarah Urist Green explains in the above episode of The Art Assign­ment, the past hun­dred years has wit­nessed a lot of con­cep­tu­al art afford­ed space in even the most staid insti­tu­tions.

Foun­tain was a pre­med­i­tat­ed piece, but some­times, these art­works, or pranks, if you pre­fer — Green favors let­ting each view­er reach their own con­clu­sions — are more spon­ta­neous in nature.

She ref­er­ences the case of two teenaged boys who, under­whelmed by a Mike Kel­ley stuffed ani­mal instal­la­tion at the San Fran­cis­co Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, posi­tioned a pair of eye­glass­es in such a way that oth­er vis­i­tors assumed they, too, were part of an exhib­it.

One of the boys told The New York Times that “when art is more abstract, it is more dif­fi­cult to inter­pret,” caus­ing him to lose inter­est.

“We had a good laugh about it,” the oth­er added.

And that, for us, gets to the heart of Foun­tain’s endur­ing pow­er.

Plen­ty of art world stunts, whether their inten­tion was to shock, cri­tique, or screw with the gate­keep­ers have been lost to the ages.

Foun­tain, at heart, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable kind of fun­ny…

Fun­ny in the same way poet Rus­sell Edson’s “With Sin­cer­est Regrets” is fun­ny:

WITH SINCEREST REGRETS

for Charles Sim­ic

Like a white snail the toi­let slides into the liv­ing room, demand­ing to be loved. It is impos­si­ble, and we ten­der our sin­cer­est regrets.In the book of the heart there is no men­tion made of plumb­ing.

And though we have spent our inti­ma­cy many times with you, you belong to a rather unfor­tu­nate ref­er­ence, which we would rather not embrace…

The toi­let slides out of the liv­ing room like a white snail, flush­ing with grief…

More recent art world con­tro­ver­sies — Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Vir­gin Mary” and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — arose from the jux­ta­po­si­tion of seri­ous reli­gious sub­ject mat­ter with bod­i­ly flu­ids.

By con­trast, Foun­tain took the piss out of a sec­u­lar high church — the estab­lished art world.

And it did so with a fac­to­ry-fresh uri­nal, no more gross than a porce­lain din­ner plate.

No won­der peo­ple could­n’t stop talk­ing about it!

We still are.

Green recounts how per­for­mance artists Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi attempt­ed to “cel­e­brate the spir­it of mod­ern art” by uri­nat­ing on the Tate Modern’s Foun­tain repli­ca in 2000.

That per­for­mance, titled “Two artists piss on Ducham­p’s Uri­nal” was “intend­ed to make peo­ple re-eval­u­ate what con­sti­tut­ed art itself and how an act could be art.”

Their action might have made a more ele­gant — and fun­nier — state­ment had the Foun­tain repli­ca not been dis­played inside a vit­rine.

Still, draw­ing atten­tion to their inabil­i­ty to hit the tar­get might, as Green sug­gests, high­light how muse­um cul­ture “fetishizes and pro­tects the objects” it, or his­to­ry, deems wor­thy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

Watch Mar­cel Duchamp’s Hyp­not­ic Rotore­liefs: Spin­ning Discs Cre­at­ing Opti­cal Illu­sions on a Turntable (1935)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Far be it from me, or any­one, to know the future, but sev­er­al signs point toward anoth­er sea­son or two of stay­ing indoors — and maybe putting trav­el plans on hold again. If, like me, you find your­self itch­ing to get away, maybe to final­ly make the jour­ney to see the art you’ve only seen in small-scale repro­duc­tions, don’t despair just yet. The art is com­ing to you, in ultra-high res­o­lu­tion, gigapix­el images from Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute.

See extra­or­di­nary lev­els of detail in famous works of art like Ver­meer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring and Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night. “So much of the beau­ty and pow­er of art lives in the details,” writes Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute Engi­neer Ben St. John.

“You can only ful­ly appre­ci­ate the genius of artists like Mon­et or Van Gogh when you stand so close to a mas­ter­piece that your nose almost touch­es it.” This kind of inti­ma­cy is near­ly impos­si­ble to achieve in a crowd­ed gallery.

Google’s enor­mous art pho­tographs are, in some ways, supe­ri­or to obser­va­tion with the eye: “Zoom­ing into these images is the clos­est thing to walk­ing up to the real thing with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass.” Even when paint­ed on flat can­vas­es, works of art exist in three dimen­sions, and there’s still the mat­ter of col­or repro­duc­tion on your screen…. Yet the point remains: there’s no way you’d be able to get as close to Mon­et or Van Gogh’s work in per­son unless you were a con­ser­va­tor or maybe a muse­um guard.

Cre­at­ing these images has hith­er­to been an extreme­ly time-con­sum­ing affair that required the expert know-how of tech­ni­cians, a process that has ham­pered the wide adop­tion of gigapix­el images for the study of art. “In the first five years of the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute,” Google admits, “we’ve only been able to share about 200 gigapix­el images.” The process can now be auto­mat­ed, how­ev­er, expand­ing the gallery to 1800+ images and count­ing, with the inven­tion of a sophis­ti­cat­ed machine called the Art Cam­era:

A robot­ic sys­tem steers the cam­era auto­mat­i­cal­ly from detail to detail, tak­ing hun­dreds of high res­o­lu­tion close-ups of the paint­ing. To make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke, it’s equipped with a laser and a sonar that—much like a bat—uses high fre­quen­cy sound to mea­sure the dis­tance of the art­work. Once each detail is cap­tured, our soft­ware takes the thou­sands of close-up shots and, like a jig­saw, stitch­es the pieces togeth­er into one sin­gle image.

The tech­no­log­i­cal break­through inar­guably enhances our expe­ri­ence of art, whether we ever get to see these works in per­son, and it pre­serves a cul­tur­al lega­cy for pos­ter­i­ty. “Many of the works of our great­est artists are frag­ile and sen­si­tive to light and humid­i­ty,” Google Arts & Cul­ture notes. “With the Art Cam­era, muse­ums can share these price­less works with the glob­al pub­lic while they’re ensur­ing they’re pre­served for future gen­er­a­tions.”

They are pre­served in mul­ti­ple views that give the illu­sion of a three-dimen­sion­al expe­ri­ence, includ­ing a “street view” option that places view­ers inside the gallery and an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty app called Art Pro­jec­tor that “lets you see how art­works look in real size in front of you.” View­ing art this way goes miles beyond my art his­to­ry edu­ca­tion spent star­ing at the pages of Janson’s His­to­ry of Art, try­ing to imag­ine what it would be like if I could actu­al­ly see what was hap­pen­ing on the can­vas.

Projects like Google Arts & Cul­ture offer an entire­ly new kind of art edu­ca­tion by dig­i­tal­ly con­serv­ing hun­dreds of art­works that don’t tend to appear in text­books, sur­veys, or muse­um gift shops. Works, for exam­ple, like Joos van Craes­beeck­’s Hierony­mus Bosch-influ­enced The Temp­ta­tion of Saint Antho­ny, which show how seri­ous­ly Bosch’s con­tem­po­raries and fol­low­ers took his medieval “dia­b­leries”; and Kris­t­ian Zahrt­man­n’s 1894 paint­ing The Mys­te­ri­ous Wed­ding in Pis­toia. “Idolised” in his time, Zahrt­mann “man­aged to reju­ve­nate Dan­ish paint­ing in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry” then sank into obscu­ri­ty. His work is now “the object of renewed inter­est — at the dawn of anoth­er new cen­tu­ry.”

While I hope our expe­ri­ence of art does not become pri­mar­i­ly vir­tu­al, we can be grate­ful for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to see — in ways we nev­er could before — the up-close hand­i­work of artists who can feel so far away from us even in the best of times. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load 586 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness