Duchamp's Fountain is intended to question people's ideas about what art is: there are few things that make people think about what art is or how it is expressed; They just assume that art is either painting or sculpture. Therefore, few people will regard spring as a work of art. "Will this urinal be a work of art?" In the process of urinal becoming a work of art, the name change is so important. It is the change of this name that has become unusual and changed the way people look at objects. The urinal, different from the elegant hall, is also an elegant art.

1 dada school

19 16, at the initiative of the poet Charla, the painters Hewsenbeck and Alp, a group of Swiss artists who fled the neutral World War I set up an art group and randomly turned out the word "dada" from the dictionary to name it. From then on, Dadaism was born. They emphasized anti-tradition, anti-rationality, anti-aesthetics, anti-morality, and even opposed cubism and futurism, which were already radical at that time. They think that art has nothing to do with art, and anything ready-made can be a work of art, thus denying all traditions about art. Duchamp is one of the important representatives of Dada Movement.

2 "Spring"

19 17, Duchamp sent a finished magnetic urinal to participate in the exhibition held by new york Independent Artists Association, and the work was named "Spring". It was angrily rejected by the exhibition layout Committee. It caused a lasting noise in hermeneutics. In fact, it became a milestone in the chronicle of modern art.

Fountain shows a complete denial and criticism of all traditional artistic concepts. Any previous art school, no matter how radical, at least admitted that art must have an artist's creative process, and generally speaking, art should at least express beauty. The appearance of Spring even denied this most "at least" artistic concept.

3 the negation of "creation"

Duchamp was accused of copying off-the-shelf products, but he argued that it didn't matter whether it was created by the author. The important thing is to choose it and "let people look at it from a new angle". The original practical significance has disappeared, but it has gained new content. "

As the first "installation" work in the history of western art, Spring pioneered the so-called "installation art".

Since then, ready-made products have entered the art field, changing the concept of empathy projection that can only be made with brushes and hands and turning to the spiritual activities behind objective vision. The whole western artistic trend of thought has entered another milestone of artistic view.

He once said that his highest evaluation is not art, but life itself; It's not a masterpiece, it's a free intellectual game. From this, we can understand his anti-traditional and anti-artistic mocking attitude when using ready-made products.

4 the negation of "beauty"

As we all know, Angel's masterpiece Spring is almost a model of aestheticism. However, Duchamp gave the "unsightly" urinal the same name, thus completely smashing the traditional "beauty". Moreover, he claimed that the outer curve and triangle composition of this work are the same as that of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and its soft and smooth texture effect and light-shade conversion are exactly the same as those of the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Through this cynical work, Duchamp launched a very sharp challenge to the traditional artistic concept.

Duchamp's thought of artistic non-artistry is misunderstood here, but misunderstanding has brought a new possibility to art. Lao Shenbo discovered beauty from ready-made products and reversed Duchamp's thought, that is, non-artistry, as Duchamp himself said: "When I found the finished product, what I thought in my heart was to deny beauty. For Xindada, they took my finished product to discover beauty. I threw the bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now they praise them for their beauty. "

Dadaism, represented by Duchamp and his work Spring, occupies an important position in the history of western art development. They not only created a genre, a style of painting, but more importantly, their extreme critical spirit destroyed all traditional concepts, thus releasing the spiritual shackles for the new ideas and genres that came in droves and opening up an infinitely broad development space.