A ready-made, known also as found object, found art or, in most languages other than English, objet trouvé, is an object, usually commonplace and extra-artistic (although the latter is not an absolute condition as long as the object is familiar enough), transformed by minimal or moderate intervention, or sometimes no intervention other than the artist’s decision that it should be so, into a work of art. We can also quote Andre Breton’s definition, saying that ready-mades are "manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist." (Quoted from Wikipedia) There are two reasons why we cannot accept Breton’s definition as the definitive and only one: non-manufactured (but identifiable) objects of all kinds can also be used as ready-mades, and the word “dignity”, we feel, should better be avoided in this context.

A case of minimal intervention can be seen above: Fountain, the second and the best known of Duchamp’s ready-mades, a urinal removed from its place of functionality to a gallery and laid on its back. Duchamp signed it “R. Mutt” (“armut” means “poverty” in German) and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists to general consternation in the art world. Fountain is considered to be the first conceptualist work of art, and the term objet trouvé was coined by Duchamp himself. It is obvious that Fountain’s previous identity as a urinal plays an important role in its new life as a work of art and is not meant to be denied or overlooked, nor is its form meant to suggest anything else. It is lying on its back not in order to be more suggestive of a fountain but simply because its back was the only flat area on which it could be safely placed once it had been removed from its wall mounting.

Below is an example of moderate intervention: Picasso’s Head of a Bull. Picasso used
two unmodified objects, the handlebars and the seat of a bicycle, and placed them into a spatial relationship different from the one they would be in if they were still parts of a bicycle. That meant that he chose to deny the original identity of his found objects and preserved only their sensible presence (their form as experienced by the five senses).

Ready-mades have been used in other art forms such as music, poetry, literature in general an, of course, film. This is easier to understand if one remembers that a ready-made does not have to be an object: it can be a sound, a concept – in fact, it can be almost anything, the preconditions being that it had a recognisable identity not fashioned by the artist before it became his ready-made, and that it became a ready-made by means of the artist’s conscious and purposeful decision (and, usually, action, but in some cases decision alone can suffice) rather than by accident.