Found object

A found object is an ordinary or discarded thing presented as art, often with little alteration. It challenges distinctions between art and utility, and between artistic creation and selection.

Marcel Duchamp: A French-American artist whose readymades challenged conventional definitions of art. His readymades established the artist’s choice of an object as an artistic act.
Readymade: An ordinary manufactured object designated as art, especially in Marcel Duchamp’s practice. The readymade is the clearest method for making a found object art through designation.
Assemblage (art): An art form that combines disparate objects or materials into a three-dimensional composition. Assemblage constructs a composition from objects, whereas a found object may remain largely unchanged.
Conceptual art: Art in which the idea or concept takes precedence over the finished material object. Found objects helped make artistic choice and framing legible as the work’s central ideas.
Fountain (Duchamp): A 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp, consisting of a urinal signed “R. Mutt.” This contested readymade made the found object’s challenge to artistic authorship explicit.
Appropriation (art): The use of existing images, objects, or styles in a new work of art. Appropriation shares the found object’s reliance on selecting material that already exists.
Objet trouvé: An object found by chance and valued or used for its aesthetic qualities, especially in Surrealism. Surrealist chance encounters differ from the deliberate designation central to many readymades.
Anti-art: Artistic practices that reject or mock established definitions and institutions of art. Found objects can act as anti-art by treating ordinary selection as a challenge to artistic rules.
Dada: An avant-garde movement that rejected established artistic and social conventions, emerging during World War I. Dada provided the anti-traditional setting in which found objects became provocative artworks.
Artistic authorship: The attribution of a work’s creation and meaning to an artist or other author. Found objects shift authorship from making an object toward choosing and presenting it.

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