What Is a Readymade in Art? Marcel Duchamp & Art History

Institutional critique in conceptual art examines how museums and galleries construct meaning through selection, framing, and certification rather than intrinsic artistic value. This concept challenges the myth of museum neutrality, revealing that curatorial decisions involve ideological choices, financial interests, and power dynamics. Artists like Michael Asher removed gallery walls to expose building infrastructure, creating discomfort to reveal that supposedly pure artistic spaces are actually controlled systems. Marcel Broodthaers created fake museums with empty cases containing banal objects, demonstrating that institutional authority derives from the power to declare something as art rather than from the objects themselves. This critique enables art to address topics like money, profit, and systemic injustice that conventional beautiful art cannot effectively communicate.

Institutional critique is an academic term describing art that actively critiques the structures it lives in, such as museums, galleries, and auction houses. This concept emerged after institutions started collecting more ephemeral and performative works made by artists in the 1960s and 1970s who strategically tried to avoid traditional art spaces. Despite artists' efforts to evade these spaces, museums were happy to matriculate these evasive works and include them in their histories of art. The art world loves being questioned and criticized, which has become almost like a kind of high-class teasing or 'negging.'

Institutional critique examines the relationship between artists and institutions, drawing attention to how art is framed, presented, and valued within the art system. Emerging in the late 1960s alongside conceptual art, this movement involves artists actively resisting institutional power structures. Key components include examining social, political, cultural, and economic factors that determine what constitutes fine art. The art system encompasses museums, galleries, private collections, critics, curators, dealers, collectors, patrons, and funding bodies—all serving as gatekeepers who control artistic value and historical recognition. Artists reveal processes to enable public scrutiny or express dissatisfaction with hidden biases and commercial agendas. According to art critic Astrid Mania, institutional critique seeks to unmask the structures and ideological armatures of western exhibition institutions. Antonymont's 'Between the Frames' exemplifies this approach through extensive interviews with 160 professionals across eight chapters, demonstrating how artworks' interpretation depends less on artist intentions than on how they are absorbed and positioned by the art system.

Institutional critique is an artistic practice that emerged in the 1960s, where artists are invited by museums to create site-specific works that critically examine the institution's systems, behaviors, and relationship with society, serving as an intrinsic mechanism for cultural institutions to reveal their idiosyncratic behaviors and update themselves to correspond with contemporary realities.

Institutional critique through the anatomy of the gallery museum may be a thing of the past since its techniques have been co-opted by the institution of the art world and art market. Every form of radical cultural activity at some point gets co-opted and warmly embraced by institutional big brother. The notion of critique has changed fundamentally. In the 70s and 80s, fundamental critique was important to make certain modes of power relations visible. Now that these layers have been addressed, practitioners move on and build upon this knowledge. The interesting point is how to rethink critique in a broader sense, as classical critique inside versus outside is no longer possible. Things must work within one structure with lots of micro-conflicts.

The ready-made is an artistic concept where an ordinary manufactured object is selected by an artist and presented as art, with the artist's choice becoming the creative act rather than the physical making; this concept, pioneered by Marcel Duchamp with his famous 1917 work 'Fountain,' has evolved through Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Postmodernism, and Appropriation Art to become a normalized practice in contemporary art where found objects are accepted as legitimate artistic materials.

Duchamp was the first person to think about the relationship between copy and original. The found object, ready-made, industrial product can be as interesting as original art. In Duchamp's view, art is no longer simply about making objects or producing something—only God made something out of nothing. After that, we are in a world where things are already made, already have names. Creating is making new things out of existing things by reconfiguring them strategically or thinking about their conditions to recreate them or find entirely new ways of looking at them. With photo-mechanical reproduction, appropriating became immediately recognizable. Defiling the Mona Lisa was a broad statement that nothing from the past or tradition needed to be bowed down to.

Ready-made (objet trouvé) is an artistic practice where artists select ordinary objects from everyday life and transform them into works of art by recontextualizing them, thereby challenging traditional notions of artistic creation and questioning what constitutes art; this movement, exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' (1910), emphasizes conceptual meaning over technical skill and has influenced various art forms including performance, video art, and photography.

Neo-Dada was an art movement that emerged as a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, characterized by its rejection of traditional artistic standards, use of unorthodox materials and mundane objects, and emphasis on audience participation; key artists like Robert Rauschenberg created works such as 'combines' (hybrid painting-sculptures) and Jasper Johns challenged viewers to question what constitutes art, while John Cage's piece '4'33'' (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence) exemplified the movement's embrace of ambient sound and chance operations.

Dadaist techniques of appropriation, collage, and found object art have influenced many subsequent art movements, including the Neo-Dada movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg adopted Dadaist procedures, using collage and mixed media in ways that critics at the time identified as 'Neo-Dada.' This demonstrates how Dadaism's radical approach to artistic creation established a template for future artistic experimentation, showing how artistic movements can influence each other across generations. The movement's legacy includes the concept of installation art, where the entire space becomes the artwork rather than a single object, and the practice of presenting everyday objects as art, which continues to challenge traditional notions of artistic creation.

Authorship has always been contested, as culture is historically collective rather than individual. AI currently functions as a tool requiring human intervention, but questions arise about compensating artists whose works train AI systems. The tension between technological democratization and artistic uniqueness persists, with photography's evolution offering precedent. Artists must consciously resist ubiquitous digital sources to maintain creative authenticity, raising fundamental questions about originality, ownership, and the future of artistic practice in an age of intelligent machines.

Originality in contemporary art refers to presenting new concepts that help viewers rethink what art is. Derivative art repeats existing approaches and is valued as less relevant. Marcel Duchamp's 1917 'Fountain' established the readymade concept, where artists take commercial objects and present them as art, challenging the notion that artists must physically create works. Andy Warhol's 1964 soap box challenged notions that art must be abstract. Jeff Koons' 1980s dog sculptures led to a landmark copyright case where the original photographer won nearly one million dollars. Sherrie Levine's practice of copying admired artists' works challenged traditional notions of authorship. The distinction between appropriation and plagiarism lies in presentation: appropriation acknowledges the process and presents work as the artist's own, while plagiarism presents another's work as one's own for gain.

Three basic concepts lack legal consensus: what constitutes a work of art, who is the author, and what is an original work. Tax laws define 'works of art' for customs purposes (e.g., oil paintings must be hand-painted), but this protects domestic industries rather than artistic merit. Property intellectual law regulates reproductions but doesn't define original works. This creates confusion where legal reproductions are mistaken for authentic artworks. The solution requires specific laws regulating authorship, reproductions, and originals to protect collectors and citizens.

Plagiarism is illegal because it involves taking another's expression and claiming it as one's own. The law protects original expression because each author's personality inevitably colors their work. While some philosophical traditions question whether true originality exists, copyright law universally requires originality as a threshold for protection, reflecting that all people express themselves differently.

This section examines the philosophical challenges of forgery to artistic categories. When art imitates art, there is no true beginning—each work references previous works, creating an infinite regression that raises questions about authorship and originality. In the 17th century, originality began to emerge, particularly in discussions of writers like Corneille and La Fontaine, where originality meant being the origin of what one creates. The concept of authorship is a recent myth that has been constructed in both painting and literature. In the Middle Ages, much literature had no attributed author, and in painting, workshop production meant many works attributed to famous artists were actually created by assistants.