From David Pescovitz of BoingBoing:
Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp is a wonderful interactive trip through the life and work of the artist whose ideas redefined the meaning of art forever. The site, created by Andrew Stafford, is several years old but the content is as young as tomorrow. From Making Sense of Duchamp, this description of the piece Bicycle Wheel (1913):
Bicycle Wheel was the first of a class of objects that Duchamp called his “readymades.” He created twenty-one of them, all between 1915 and 1923. The readymades are a varied collection of items, but there are several ideas that unite them.
The readymades are experiments in provocation, the products of a conscious effort to break every rule of the artistic tradition. in order to create a new kind of art — one that engages the mind instead of the eye, in ways that provoke the observer to participate and think.