A term first used in the early years of the 20th century (in the Dadaist movement), a found object is any object that an artist comes upon, and uses in an artwork, or as the artwork itself. Marcel Duchamp called these works ‘readymades.’ He exhibited a urinal at the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in [...]
A term first used in the early years of the 20th century (in the Dadaist movement), a found object is any object that an artist comes upon, and uses in an artwork, or as the artwork itself. Marcel Duchamp called these works ‘readymades.’ He exhibited a urinal at the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York in 1917, under the signature ‘R Mutt’; Dada was the precursor to Surrealism, and was an ‘anti-art’ movement after the Great War, which sought to avoid order and rationality in art. Dada also questioned the very meaning of art: ‘what is art’? ‘who decides if an object is art’? ‘is it art because an artist places it in a museum and calls it art’? etc.