In 1999, two Chinese artists, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Ianjun, jumped on "My Bed," a work by the British artist Tracey Emin that comprised an unmade bed accompanied by empty bottles, dirty underwear and used condoms and was on show at Tate Britain. The following year, the two artists urinated on Tate Modern's version of "Fountain," noting that Duchamp himself had said that artists defined art.

A British artist, Michael Landy, held what he called "Break Down" in an empty department store in London in 2001: In this happening, he destroyed all his possessions, including art donated by friends. In 1991, it was another artist - generally described as unbalanced - who attacked Michelangelo's statue "David" and damaged a foot.

Other protests have included blue dye sprayed over Carl André's display of bricks at the Tate Gallery in London in 1976 and red dye squirted in 1994 into a transparent container displaying Damien Hirst's dead sheep preserved in formalin. Still, not all vandalism is intended: Another work by Hirst on display in a Mayfair Gallery in 2001 - half-full coffee cups, dirty ashtrays, beer bottles and the like - was thrown away by cleaners.

In Pinoncelli's case, nothing is accidental. After he was jailed for one month and fined the equivalent of $37,500 for urinating in and damaging "Fountain" in the Carré des Arts in Nîmes in 1993, he said he wanted to rescue the work from its inflated iconic status and return it to its original function as a urinal.

However, the Nice-based artist has been busy since the early 1960s with what he calls "les happenings de rue," or "street happenings."

In 1969, he used a pistol to spray red paint on France's culture minister, André Malraux. In 1975, he "held up" a bank in Nice with a fake pistol and no ammunition to protest Nice's decision to become Cape Town's twin city while South Africa was still under apartheid. That same year, he paraded outside Nice's courts, covered in large yellow stars, in what he called his homage to deported Jews.

Perhaps his strangest action to date, though, occurred at a festival of performance art in the Colombian city of Cali in 2002. There, he protested the kidnapping of a Colombian politician, Ingrid Betancourt, by the country's leftist guerrillas by chopping off half of the smallest finger of his left hand.