Readymade

Readymade is a term introduced by the artist Marcel Duchamp to denote artworks created from mass-produced industrial objects, selected and declared art by the very fact of the artist's choice. Duchamp began using the concept around 1915. The essence of the readymade lay in a radical shift: the artist no longer paints or sculpts anything but merely singles out an ordinary object from the flow of consumption, places it in an artistic context, and grants it a new status. The most famous example was "Fountain" of 1917 — a factory-made porcelain urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and submitted to an exhibition. Duchamp also turned a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, and a snow shovel into art. The readymade called into question fundamental notions of craftsmanship, originality, authorship, and the very nature of art, asserting that the decisive factor is the artist's idea and gesture rather than craft. This idea had a colossal influence on Dada, Conceptual art, Pop art, and nearly all art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.