In 1913, at a moment when art was still largely defined by craftsmanship, painting, and sculpture, Marcel Duchamp introduced Bicycle Wheel. Instead of creating a new form, he selected and combined two ordinary manufactured objects. At a time when the value of art was closely tied to skill and manual labor, Duchamp shifted the focus away from making and toward choice, proposing that the artistic act could exist purely in the decision to designate an object as art.
This particular object is important because it clearly posed, for the first time, the question: what makes something art — form or thought? The wheel and the stool lose their practical function but gain meaning. The viewer no longer asks “how is it made?” but instead begins to ask “why is it here?” From this moment on, art becomes not an object but an idea — and this is where the ready-made begins.
Bicycle Wheel
In 1913, at a moment when art was still largely defined by craftsmanship, painting, and sculpture, Marcel Duchamp introduced Bicycle Wheel. Instead of creating a new form, he selected and combined two ordinary manufactured objects. At a time when the value of art was closely tied to skill and manual labor, Duchamp shifted the focus away from making and toward choice, proposing that the artistic act could exist purely in the decision to designate an object as art.
This particular object is important because it clearly posed, for the first time, the question: what makes something art — form or thought?
The wheel and the stool lose their practical function but gain meaning. The viewer no longer asks “how is it made?” but instead begins to ask “why is it here?” From this moment on, art becomes not an object but an idea — and this is where the ready-made begins.