Sherrie Levine (Born 1947 in Hazleton, PA) is known for appropriating the work of canonical male artists in order to deconstruct accepted art-historical concepts like originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium and suggest their inherent mutability.

Over a decade after she began reproducing works by famous male artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Walker Evans, and Willem de Kooning, Levine created a cast bronze replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, one of the first readymade sculptures, a commercially manufactured urinal that Duchamp removed from a functional context and presented as a work of art. In Levine’s Fountain (Buddha), she recasts Duchamp’s work in a critical light, challenging the nearly universal acceptance and celebration of Duchamp’s early twentieth-century radicalism. Levine subverts the everyday quality of Duchamp’s readymade by casting the work in bronze, a valuable material with strong currency in the history of sculpture. Levine collapses multiple associations within this work, as the low-culture urinal is presented as a bronze masterwork. The title points to the visual similarity of the upturned urinal with Buddhist reliquary sculptures, offering many pathways for reconsidering the original work.