Everyday object selected and designated as art.
The name was coined by Marcel Duchamp , whose first ready-mades included a snow shovel that he picked up on a snowy day in New York, and a wheel mounted on a stool (1913). They represented a protest against the excessive importance attached to works of art. Duchamp's anti-aesthetic gestures made him one of the leading Dadaists of his day, and his ready-made concept, though widely regarded for decades as an insult to art, was adapted by such later artists as Robert Rauschenberg , Andy Warhol , and Jasper Johns .