ABSTRACT
The general idea in this chapter is to build a bridge, to try to understand the cultural, historical, and subjective changes that have taken place to enable the expression of completely different aesthetics and dissimilar conceptions of art in two works, the titles of which have a similar meaning: The Source by Ingres, and The Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. The Freudian concept of sublimation consists in drive activity without the intervention of repression: therefore, it implies satisfaction different from sexual satisfaction. Kant distinguishes the aesthetic category of the beautiful and compares it to the category of the sublime in his Critique of Judgement , a work that reached its highest expression in the Romantic period. Duchamp changes the parameters of art from the act of seeing to the act of thinking and, therefore, he leaves the idea free of any virtuosity in the form. The uncanny aspect of the human condition has acquired presentation in contemporary art in the present.
