Is It Art or Just a Toilet Seat?

1.      Describe the toilet seat that is being discussed in this article. What does it look like, when painted and by whom?

2.      Why would anyone pay 100,000 or more for it?

3.      Do you think the intentions of the painters who painted it are relevant to whether or not it is art? (If Michelangelo draws a picture of a fish and rolls on a napkin to indicate to the waiter what he wants for dinner, is that art?)

4.      Must the toilet seat fit into the corpus of the painter if it is to be art, as Danto claims?

5.      Is the toilet seat memorabilia rather than art? What is the difference?

6.      What did Picasso do with his checks to help insure they were not cashed?