ABSTRACT
The artist’s act of creation is shifted away from the material production of an object – the physical action of painting a painting or sculpting a sculpture – becoming instead grounded in the moment of an artist’s choice of this or that object. While the person creating the readymade may alter the already existing item, perhaps in significant and personal ways, at its base the original ‘indifferent’ object chosen by the artist remains at the core of the work and working process. The point is that if Marcel Duchamp bought a copy of the winter landscape in two separate art supply stores, even in different cities or countries, both versions of the object would provide the same experience, quite literally allowing him to remake his readymade with, similarly, little to no difference from a previous version. Like the mass-produced objects that constitute the bulk of them, the readymades are for the most part equally reproducible.
