LENIENCY FOR FOUNTAIN VANDALIST

A French appeals court ruled Friday that a seventy-eight-year-old Frenchman who attacked Marcel Duchamp’s famed porcelain urinal with a hammer last year does not have to pay $260,000 in damages, reports the Associated Press. Pierre Pinoncelli chipped the work, valued at $3.6 million, during a January 2006 exhibition of the Dada movement at the Pompidou Center in Paris. He also scrawled “DADA” on the urinal. At the time, Pinoncelli said his actions were not vandalism but a “wink” at the art movement. The lower court that convicted Pinoncelli last year gave him a three-month suspended sentence and ordered him to pay the Pompidou $18,600 for repairs and another $260,000 to cover the artwork’s depreciation.