Who’s your Dada?

By now you've probably heard about the 76 year old performance artist who chose to express himself artistically by attacking Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain” with a hammer. He insists that his attack on the $3.6 million urinal would have pleased Dada artists. This is the performance artists second vandalism of the piece. In 1993 he also urinated into it when it was on display in France. In a poll of 500 arts figures taken in 2004, “Fountain” is the most influential work of modern art.
The Dada movement was a protest by a group of European artists against World War I, bourgeois society, and the conservatism of traditional thought. Its followers used absurdities and non sequiturs to create artworks and performances which defied intellectual analysis. They also included random “found” objects in sculptures and installations. In 1917 Duchamp created “Fountain”, a urinal signed with one of the pseudonyms under which he worked, R. Mutt. With this work, which was excluded from the first exhibition of the New York Society of Independent Artists, Duchamp simultaneously created the first ready-made and ignited the “but is it art?” debate that continues to rage to this day. Dadaism evolved into Surrealism in the 1920's.
Luckily, the urinal was only “slightly chipped” which goes to show that old men with hammers really aren't the menace to society we had once believed them to be. So remember, if an old man is chasing after you with a hammer, there is nothing to fear. The worst that might happen before he is arrested is that he might lose control of his bladder, or maybe slightly chip one of your porcelain crowns.