The Carrie Nation of Found Art

Famous Urinal Artwork Damaged by Man with a Hammer

PARIS (AFP) - "Fountain", a famous artwork consisting of a ceramic urinal made by French-US artist Marcel Duchamp, has been damaged while on display in Paris's Pompidou Centre by an elderly vandal armed with a hammer, the museum and police said.

The sculpture was slightly chipped and fractured in the attack Wednesday by the 77-year-old man, who was taken into custody and presented to a judge Thursday.

...Police said it was the second time the old man had brutalized "Fountain". In 1993, he attacked it while it was part of an exhibition in Nimes, southern France.

On you-can't-dip-your-toe-in-the-same-Seine-twice grounds, I'd say that was a poor call on the AFP's part to paraphrase the cops with, "it was the second time the old man had brutalized 'Fountain'". You're just not the same old man in 2006 that you were in 1993, no matter what your carte d'identitie says.

Update: The AFP's story was clearly deficient in all respects. The NYT's reifies the old man. He's a dada grand-daddy, a twice or thrice found-artist himself, a Remax Ernst, a Marcel Deuxchamp.

The Glimpse Unprovided

2005 and 2006 are already battling over ownership of the most heroically superfluous paragraph of either (depending on who wins the fight, the baby or the old man) this year of last. It might even be a new rhetorical life-form: the retro-sequitur, the inanachronism, the chronillogical future disjunctive:

Dick Clark 'Not 100%' as Clock Is Ticking

...Mr. Clark, who at 76 is no longer very often identified as "America's oldest teenager," missed the show last year following a stroke. He has made no public appearances since then and, normally chatty with the press, has been silent while preparing for his return tonight.

...On Thursday night, Mr. Clark was looking spry and healthy on "ABC Extreme Bloopers," an hourlong edition of his long-running collection of television outtakes. But the show did not provide a glimpse of Mr. Clark's current health; it was first broadcast in May 2004, seven months before his stroke.

Talk about your inexplicable TV moments, JFK was looking fit to be fuct, his head completely intact, and Marilyn Monroe was thoroughly upright, singing and sewn into seven pounds of sequins, not naked and dead in the bedroom of the dolls at all, when I saw them recently in a televised clip of JFK's 1962 birthday celebration.