Some jokes are worth telling over and over. In 1915 Marcel Duchamp walked into a hardware store, purchased a snow shovel, signed it, dated it, called it In Advance of the Broken Arm and hung it from his studio ceiling. Art! This intentional perversion of artistic creation is called a ‘readymade'—claiming a found object as an artwork. Readymades were a popular form of Dadaist art, and Duchamp is often cited as the inventor of the idea, however, for all his innovation, we believe it was his much wilder friend Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who created the first Readymades.
Duchamp ‘remade’ In Advance of the Broken Arm many times. The image above is from fourth version, created in 1964.
