The Fountain, arguably the most important art work today, is a ceramic work, but it has nothing to do with ceramics. Jeff Koons’s Puppy (Vase) from 1998 and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party from 1979 both draw heavily on a discourse of ceramics, but in so doing, emphasises the unbridgeable gap between art and ceramics. It is actually the incompatibility of art and its material – ceramics – which produces the meaning of the works.