What is a readymade? Can the emoji be a readymade in contemporary art? Roughly a century after Marcel Duchamp brought the everyday object into the space of art, what is “ready” today is no longer only physical objects; the digital symbols we use on our screens every day can be ready-made too. My art practice takes shape precisely inside this idea: my readymade is the emoji.
What Is a Readymade?
When we speak of the “readymade” in art history, the first name that comes to mind is Marcel Duchamp. In the early 20th century, Duchamp questioned the assumption that an artist must produce an object from scratch. He chose objects that were mass-produced and already existed in everyday life, and carried them into the context of art.
A bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a urinal… The objects already existed. What the artist did was not merely to make them, but to choose them, to change their context, and to make us look at them anew.
This approach shifted one of the fundamental questions in art history. Alongside “What did the artist make?” came another question: “What did the artist choose, and why?” Duchamp’s readymades became one of the crucial ruptures showing that a work of art cannot be defined by craftsmanship alone, or by a unique object made by the artist’s hand.
How a Urinal Changed the History of Art
In 1917, Duchamp submitted an ordinary urinal bearing the signature “R. Mutt” to an exhibition under the title Fountain. The object was severed from its everyday function, positioned differently, named, and inserted into the context of art.
The real issue here was not the urinal. The issue was choice and context. Duchamp’s intervention carried art beyond the physical object. It made visible how decisive idea, choice and context can be in a work of art.
One of the roots of the conceptual approach we meet across so much of contemporary art today lies right here. But more than a hundred years have passed. Our everyday life has changed. And to my mind, it is time to ask the question again.
What Is Today’s Readymade?
In Duchamp’s era, the objects of everyday life came out of industrial production. Today, a significant part of our lives is lived inside screens. Every day we see, send and consume hundreds of digital signs.
Hearts. Faces. Hands. Eyes. Flames. Flowers. Animals. Objects. And emojis.
We don’t design them. We choose them from within a ready-made visual language handed to us. It is exactly for this reason that I see the emoji not merely as a tool of communication, but as one of the most widespread digital readymades of our age.
My Readymade: The Emoji
In the practice I’ve been developing since 2016 and have named arteemoji, I use the emoji as a material and a visual language. For me the emoji is not just a small icon on a phone screen.
I choose it. I take it out of its context. I repeat it. I place them side by side. I change its scale. I relate it to other images. Sometimes hundreds of emojis come together to form another image. What is a few millimetres of a sign on a screen becomes, in my work, part of a painting.
What matters to me here is not redesigning the emoji; it is looking differently at a symbol that already exists. Because one of the most powerful aspects of readymade practice lies right here: you don’t have to change the object. Sometimes changing where it stands is enough to transform its meaning entirely.
From Duchamp’s Fountain to the Screen’s Emoji
Duchamp’s Fountain was an object whose function was predetermined in everyday life. So is the emoji. ❤️’s job seems clear; it marks an emotion. 😂 tells us we’re laughing. 🔥 can show that we find something strong, popular or striking.
But what happens when we take these symbols out of their communicative function and carry them into the space of art? That is exactly the territory I’m interested in. Duchamp separated the object from its function so that we would look at it anew. I take the emoji out of its communicative function and turn it into visual material.
That is why I don’t see my own practice as cut off from art history, as merely a “digital” production. On the contrary, I’m looking for the equivalent, in today’s visual culture, of a question art history has been asking for a long time: can something that already exists become something else through the artist’s choice?
Why Is the Emoji So Important for Our Age?
Today the emoji is an almost universal system of visual communication. Even when our languages differ, most of us can grasp the basic emotion an ❤️ carries when we see it. This turns the emoji into an intriguing art material — because the emoji is at once personal and mass.
The heart we send to someone can be intensely personal; yet that same heart lives on millions of screens around the world. For me the real tension begins here: what happens when an image that belongs to everyone becomes part of an artist’s language?
Throughout art history, artists have used the visual culture of their own era again and again. Pop Art carried the images of consumer culture into art. Andy Warhol made images tied to mass production and mass consumption — like Campbell’s soup cans — the subject of his art.
Today, mass culture is no longer only on supermarket shelves. It’s in our pocket. On our screen. In our messages. And perhaps one of the most mass images of our age is no longer a soup can, but a tiny yellow face: 🙂
Can the Readymade Now Be Digital?
To me this is one of the most interesting questions for contemporary art. Does a readymade necessarily have to be physical? If an artist can choose a ready-made chair, why not a ready-made digital symbol?
Today a large part of our culture is produced, stored and consumed digitally. For this reason the very concept of the “object” is transforming too. I read the emoji from within this transformation. For me the emoji is not an effect standing in for paint, nor a decorative element. The emoji is the very object I’m thinking about.
In using it, I carry into the painting the mode, the speed, the repetition and the shared visual memory of our age’s communication. I take a symbol we consume in seconds on a screen and slow it down. I enlarge it. I make it repeat. I carry it into the time of painting. Perhaps this is exactly what lies at the centre of what I do: turning a fast-consumed sign into an image that must be looked at again.
Art’s Object Is Changing
Throughout the history of art, the tools and materials the artist uses have changed. Stone. Paint. Canvas. Photograph. Film. Found object. Video. Computer. Screen. And now the symbols of our everyday digital language.
For this reason, working with the emoji means, for me, less a search for technological novelty than using the visual language of the age I live in. In Duchamp’s time a readymade could be a bottle rack, a bicycle wheel or a urinal. Today a readymade can be a symbol inside the phone we carry in our pocket. In my practice, that symbol is the emoji.
Duchamp had his fountain. I have my emojis.— Didem Medine İnci
And perhaps the unchanging side of art is exactly here: the objects we use change, but what the artist does still begins with the same question: “How else can we look at this?”
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