[fragment]

Although there can be aesthetics involved in practical urinal placement, I'm sure. Pissing might be more fun if that was a more common approach.

But yeah, at least some of the art that raised the "is it art?" question was deliberately provoking it in order to get people to think about their assumptions about what art might or might not be. And since one of the purposes of art can be to provoke people into thinking about stuff, it sort of makes itself art by asking that question.

After that ready-mades became a bit of a style by themselves. At worst it can be lazy artwank, but at best I think being forced to look at everyday objects in a gallery context can encourage you to appreciate aesthetic qualities in your life outside of galleries. In some ways, it gets you thinking a bit like an artist; instead of just seeing a table with a bowl of fruit and a pack of cigarettes on it, an artist can see a potential work of art, and be thinking about how they are arranged spatially, the ways the colours contrast, the ways the shadows fall. Even if you can't paint worth a damn (like me), you can look at things in that way.