It is in vain that it rests in the museum and gets added to the cultural heritage. For some, it has not stopped being the harbinger of the happy day when art will finally fall from its pedestal and belong to everyone; for others, it remains the source of resentment and fear of the day when, everything having become art, nothing will be art any longer; and for all of us — in our society where consensus is either incomprehensible or impossible — it is still an object of dissent revealing our common plight. In conclusion, Duchamp’s urinal wields the disquieting proof of art’s alienation, an alienation that seems definitive to those who read it as evidence of decadence, provisional to those who see it as the promise of renewal, and necessary for those for whom the faculty of negating is what, in the end, promises emancipation.
Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (1996)