found object

Art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects or products that are not normally considered art

Also known as readymade · ready-made · objets trouvé · Ready-made · objets trouve · objet trouvé

Instance of: art genre
, form of art
Subclass of: work of art

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

A found object, or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of readymades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its back. In its strictest sense the term "readymade" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.

Overview

All data

39 statements · 10% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Significant person: Marcel Duchamp
Salvatore Garau
Andy Warhol
Hashtag: foundobject
Different from: formerly lost media
Genre: Dada
surrealism

On other databases

25 identifiers linking found object across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

10%

externally sourced

Source last edited August 10, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). found object (Q572916). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/found-object-Q572916