READY-MADE

everyday object selected and designated as art; the name was coined by the French artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp's first ready-made, Bicycle Wheel (1913), consisting of a wheel mounted on a stool, was his way of protesting the excessive importance attached to works of art. By selecting mass-produced, commonplace objects, Duchamp attempted to destroy the notion of the uniqueness of the art object. These antiaesthetic gestures made Duchamp one of the leading Dadaists of his day, and his ready-made technique was adapted by such contemporary artists as Robert Rauschenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns.