This is an Art Sunday entry.
To Participate leave a comment for our guest host
MICHAEL at:
http://mfhy2k.multiply.com/journal/item/376/Art_Sunday_guest_hostDuchamp's Nude Descending Staircase
is a work I had seen featured in others
Art Sunday writings. SEE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase%2C_No._2 When I began hunting for something that fit this week's theme I recalled my husband and I having been to the Carnegie art Museum and my boys saying
Mom come quick there's a bunch of toilets in there.
i tried to find the piece they had seen but alas that exhibit was years ago.
So then I thought to try searching for rejected art and viola this piece appeared!
My boys think it's great funny insane even
But ART?? I don't get it.
Here's the story behind this so called art.
People often ask what constitutes good art. Who decides whether or not a piece is
art and whether it is good art or not? Marcel Duchamp challenged popular notions of his
day about what art actually is.
Duchamp, a French artist living in New York at the turn of the century, believed
that it was up to the artist to determine what art is. Duchamp is most
famous for a type of sculpture he created called “readymades”1
Ready mades are ordinary functional household objects that have either
been joined to other objects, or chosen to stand alone as sculpture.
Marcel Duchamp’s belief was that because the artist chose
the object to be art, it was, even though the artist did not physically manufacture it
Duchamp had arrived in the United States less than two years previous to the creation of
Fountain, and had become involved with
Dada, an anti-rational, anti-art cultural movement, in New York City. Creation of
Fountain began when, accompanied by the artist
Joseph Stella and art collector
Walter Arensberg, he purchased a standard Bedfordshire model urinal from the J.L. Mott Iron Works, 118 Fifth Avenue. When the urinal was in his studio at 33 W
est 67th Street, he turned it 90 degrees from its normal position, and wrote on it "R. Mutt 1917".
[2][3] Duchamp was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists and submitted the piece under the name R. Mutt, presumably to hide his involvement with the piece, to their 1917 exhibition, which, it had been proclaimed, would exhibit all work submitted. After much debate by the board members (most of whom did not know Duchamp had submitted it) about whether the piece was or was not art, Fountain was hidden from view during the show.[4] Duchamp and Arensberg resigned from the board after the exhibition.
The New York Dadaists stirred controversy about Fountain and its being hidden from view in the second issue of The Blind Man which included a photo of the piece and a letter by Alfred Stieglitz, and writings by Beatrice Wood and Arensberg. In defense of the work being art, Wood wrote "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges." Duchamp described his purpose with the piece as shifting the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation.
You mght also want to check out The Making sense of Modern Art video article here:
http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artworks/1466.html
You know I do think it needs something maybe I got it it
As the title states This "art" takes the cake!! LOL
Great answer, thanks for playing. I never nheard of an anti-rational group. But after seeing what they call art I believe they named themselves well. 
