3 min readUpdated: Apr 10, 2026 08:25 PM IST It was more than 100 years ago that by turning a urinal upside down, artist Marcel Duchamp did the same to the art world — quite literally. In April 1917, the French-American artist famously submitted an inverted urinal brought from a store, signed and dated “R. Mutt, 1917,” to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, which claimed to be “unjuried”. Associated with the Dada movement (that questioned traditionlal values in art in post World War 1 Europe), Duchamp reportedly wanted to test that claim. Consequently, the artwork titled Fountain might have failed to find a place in their exhibition, but it did manage to cause a stir. What followed was a decades-long debate on the meaning and boundaries of what constitutes art and what can be claimed by an artist as their own work. While that discussion continues to evolve till date, and Fountain is often cited as a cornerstone of conceptual art in some ways, a new exhibition at the Museum of …