What is art? While its essence and boundaries are hard to encompass, Webster's defines it as "Stuff made with paint and clay and shit. Sometimes it's dancing around too or doing something kinda queer." This vagueness has allowed for all manners of oddities to be stamped as art and sold at exorbitant prices. Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the gullible schmuck with too much cash. However, this flexibility has allowed far too many "artists" to abandon enriching the zeitgeist in favor of being a smartass at art's expense. Advertisement

6 Marcel DuChamp's "Fountain" Continue Reading Below Advertisement What the Hell is That? You are in the presence of greatness. In 2004, 500 British art world professionals, all clad in berets, selected Fountain as the most influential artwork of the 20th century. It was emblematic of the entire Dada movement and has since inspired independent thinkers everywhere to buy matching uniforms at Hot Topic and brag online about how O.G. their atheism is. The masterwork that sparked all of this is a urinal rotated 90 degrees from its functional position and signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt." Why We're Calling 'Shenanigans' We get that the Dada folks loved the anti-rational, but everybody knows the fundamental underpinning of any work of art is a firm understanding of plumbing. Even with adequate water flow restored to this appliance, it would merely pool, leech up residual mystery crusts, and drain into the back. It would in no way function as a fountain. Continue Reading Below Advertisement Okay, so maybe that's the point, that they're calling it "Fountain" and it's not one. Of course that overlooks the fact that most everything in the known universe that doesn't have a urinal cake in it is also not a fountain. A brick or a wad of tissue would have actually been more poignant entitled "Fountain" respectively. Hell, you can stick that title on that video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth and you'd have ramped up the irony to award-winning levels. Regardless, Duchamp, awash in the heady daze of knowing he could sell anything with his dazzling French accent, tipped over the nearest slab of porcelain and called it Le Art. More specifically, shenanigart. Continue Reading Below Advertisement