Pierre Pinoncelli

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Pierre Pinoncelli is a performance artist most famous for damaging two of the eight copies of Fountain by Marcel Duchamp with a hammer as a statement that the work by now had lost its provocative value. The latest attack happened on January 4, 2006 at Centre Pompidou in Paris and the first time at an exhibition in Nîmes 1993 where he also urinated into it before using the hammer.

He has also thrown a bottle of red ink over André Malraux, the French minister of culture at the time, robbed a bank in Nice of 10 franc using a sawn-off shotgun, and cut the tip of one of his own fingers off at an art exhibition in Colombia in protest of the FARC guerilla holding the French-Colombian politician Íngrid Betancourt hostage.