Found Objects
Everyday objects selected and presented as art - or so the standard narrative claims.
Duchamp's revolutionary gesture: selecting everyday objects and declaring them art. Or was it something more complex?
Updated
4/15/2026
Reading Time
2 min
Everyday objects selected and presented as art - or so the standard narrative claims.
The idea that art could be defined by context and intention, not craft or aesthetics.
Recent research suggests the readymades were far more deliberately crafted than believed.
In 1913, Marcel Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool. In 1914, he purchased a bottle rack from a Paris department store. In 1917, he submitted a urinal signed "R. Mutt" to an art exhibition. These acts supposedly launched conceptual art by demonstrating that the artist's choice, not their craft, could define art.
This narrative has been repeated countless times: Duchamp freed art from the burden of making, showing that ideas mattered more than execution. The readymades became the foundation for much of contemporary art practice.
Research by Rhonda Shearer and others has complicated this picture considerably. Many of the "readymades" show evidence of modification or fabrication. The bottle rack doesn't match any known commercial product. The hat rack appears to be custom-made. Even the famous Fountain may not be what it claims to be.
This suggests that Duchamp wasn't simply selecting objects - he was creating elaborate simulations of mass-produced items, then presenting them as "found." The deception itself was part of the art.
Duchamp also created "assisted readymades" - found objects that were modified:
These complicate the notion that readymades were purely about selection rather than creation.
Understanding the readymades helps illuminate Elden Ring's artistic strategy:
If Duchamp's readymades were actually fabrications disguised as found objects, then deception itself becomes an artistic medium. The work exists in the gap between what we think we're seeing and what is actually there.
This same principle may apply to Elden Ring: what appears to be a conventional fantasy game is actually a sophisticated art object operating on multiple levels simultaneously.