Court hammers Duchamp foe
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A Paris court has convicted a 77-year-old French man for attacking artist Marcel Duchamp’s famed porcelain urinal with a hammer, rejecting the defendant’s contention that he had increased the value of the artwork by making it an “original.”
The court gave Pierre Pinoncelli a three-month suspended prison sentence Tuesday and ordered him to pay a $245,490 fine.
Pinoncelli also was ordered to pay $17,616 to repair “Fountain,” which was chipped in the Jan. 4 hammer attack at the Pompidou Center.
The work has an estimated value of $3.4 million, said Marie Delion, a lawyer for the Pompidou Center. The original was lost but in 1964 Duchamp created eight other versions of the work.
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