It might seem a strange paradox that, to begin a discussion of a number of recent projects pointing toward the formation of a new culture in the arts, we must start with a toilet. This toilet, however, is very different from the one that, almost a century ago, Marcel Duchamp presented at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp signed his piece ‘‘R. Mutt’’and gave it a title that served to distance or extract it from its daily uses. In 2003, the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc proposed the installation of two dry toilets in an outlying area of the city of Caracas, working in collaboration with the La Vega neighborhood association, the Caracas Urban Think Tank (ccstt) and the architects Ana María Torres and Liyat Esakov.∞ The toilets were proposed as a solution to the sewage contamination and water shortages that the inhabitants of the ciudad informal (‘‘informal city,’’the euphemism used to refer to the slums or shantytowns of Caracas) deal with on a daily basis. Potrc’s and Esakov’s solution was to take effect during a six-month trial period, after which it could be adopted by the area’s residential complex. In the artist’s own words, this project—which involved the establishment of a collaborative group, including neighbors from La Vega, the architects, and the artist herself—represents the culmination of a long search for solutions to a number of concrete problems. Potrc is part of a growing group of artists whose members do not necessarily know each other and whose importance in the contemporary art world has been steadily increasing during the course of the last decade. These artists refuse to make objects that are self-sufficient and